- Tensor Ventures has made a €550K investment in DYNANIC, a Czech university startup, alongside angel investors from prominent industry leaders.
- The spin-off from Brno University of Technology is developing technology to optimize programmable chips (FPGAs), addressing the growing demands of AI, virtual reality, and high-performance computing.
- This investment also marks the first deployment from Tensor Ventures’ newly launched second fund.
The technology that can “breathe life” into programmable chips has been developed by a team of Czech researchers from Brno University of Technology, led by Pavel Korček. With over 20 years of experience, the team has created a comprehensive environment that empowers customers to customize chipsets by selecting specific parameters to meet their needs.
“Programmable gate chips are very difficult to program, few people know how to do it, because it is not a common software development with its standard paradigms. We have acquired this capability over the past two decades, working on unique research on this very topic at the university and within the CESNET association,” says Pavol Korček, and continues, “Based on our experience, we founded a company in late 2021, with the university’s ownership, with a vision that the client could use FPGA chips without having to have their own dedicated experts.”
DYNANIC’s solution has been licensed and adopted by all major FPGA chip manufacturers, including Intel and AMD. Global technology leaders like Kakao Corp and Kaloom Networks leverage DYNANIC’s product to accelerate applications in data centers. By utilizing programmable chips, these companies dramatically increase server efficiency and optimize data traffic flows.
The fact that the team is by no means a newcomer to the technology is evidenced by the fact that in recent years it developed the world’s first 100 and 400 Gbps throughput cards. Now DYNANIC is even starting to work on technology for 800 Gbps networks, although chips for such extreme speeds are not yet available.
The need for private capital
“We want to accelerate the whole process of our entry among the heavyweights of the global chip industry, targeting so-called hyperscaler companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and IBM,” says Pavol Korček and continues, “We chose angel investors using the same key. We had a lot of offers for funding, but only some investors had extra experience and valuable contacts, just like Tensor Ventures.” For DYNANIC, the investment is a pre-seed round, although the company has also raised just under €400K in public funding in previous years.
“The investment in DYNANIC is a benchmark example of what our existing investors or potential investors can look forward to in the second investment fund we have just opened. Specifically, in this case, it is our first investment in the semiconductor vertical, or software for semiconductors, and also the first investment in a spin-off from a Czech university environment. In our opinion, it is not only in the university environment that a lot of great advanced technologies have grown up that are not visible, but all the more deserving of opening their doors to the world. Specifically, we think DYNANIC is poised to reach out to global icons of the chip industry, as the need for programmable chips is and will become more and more urgent,” says Roman Smola, co-founder of Tensor Ventures.
“We believe that similar transfers from university environments can get technology to potential customers faster, and in turn, universities can raise funds from licensing or selling shares to keep top experts on their campus,” adds Ondrej Lipold of the Tensor Ventures team that led the investment.
Tensor Ventures recently launched its second fund, targeting €50 million. This fund will support groundbreaking technologies in quantum computing, biotechnology, security, software 2.0, energy, and climate tech, with added opportunities in space technology. The fund has already secured €20 million from the EIF under the National Recovery Plan.
The founders of Tensor Ventures are not investing in DYNANIC alone, but with other angel investors. Specifically, with Premek Starovesky from Czech Republic, Roger Benson from Belgium and Werner Schaefer from the US. This is a very promising sign for DYNANIC. “At the same time, I am happy that my colleagues and I already have other startups on the table that we think have great potential,” concludes Petr Ulvr, another of the founders of Tensor Ventures.
