Kandou receives $15M to expand R&D

Kandou developed Chord signaling for enhanced communications between chips inside electronic systems ranging from cell phones to servers and high performance computing. To expand their R&D for Chord signaling solutions, Kandou has received $15 Million from Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a $4B venture capital firm active in America, Israel and India. BVP invests in enterprise, consumer and healthcare technology startups worldwide at all stages.

“We see Chord signaling as a game changer in semiconductors,” said Bessemer venture capitalist Felda Hardymon. “The demand for higher performance and lower power consumption in computing systems necessitates fundamental changes in semiconductor interconnect solutions. Kandou’s technology comes at a time when existing chip link technologies are failing. We are confident that Kandou can further develop and deploy Chord signaling in several future generations of chips.”

Kandou CEO and Founder Amin Shokrollahi’s extensive background in information theory and coding-based signaling led to the invention of Chord signaling. The technology delivers 2-4x more bandwidth and half the power consumption of traditional differential signaling. It achieves this by sending multiple bits over multiple correlated wires within each clock cycle versus differential signaling’s one bit over two correlated wires. In addition to improved performance, the result is better board, pin and silicon area efficiency as compared to existing chip interface solutions. This approach also delivers excellent signal integrity, strong resistance to common-mode and simultaneous switching noise, and a reduction of inter-symbol interference.

“Bessemer’s investment provides Kandou the opportunity to significantly expand research and development for Chord signaling architectures and solutions,” said Shokrollahi. “We’re seeing growing demand on multiple fronts for our Chord signaling technology, and we are now much better positioned to meet this need.”

(Press release)