Cavendish Kinetics raises $15.5 Million

Cavendish Kinetics has closed its second round of venture capital funding raising an additional $15.5 million dollars and increasing the number of investors to 10. The new funds will be used to continue the development of its Nanomech(tm) technology and expand its market presence among IDMs, fabless semiconductor companies and CMOS foundries. The new round of investment is being led by Tallwood Venture Capital from Palo Alto, CA and Munich-based Wellington Partners. They will be joined by additional investment from the lead investor from the first round, Celtic House Venture Partners and other first round investors Clarium Holdings Ltd., Torteval Investments Ltd. and a private investor involved in Cavendish's first round. With this second round of funding, Cavendish Kinetics will add to its Board of Directors Luis Arzubi from Tallwood Venture Capital and Bart Markus from Wellington Partners. Dr Mike Beunder, CEO of Cavendish Kinetics, said, "We are delighted to have two extremely well respected venture capital firms lead our second round. The addition of Luis and Bart to our Board of Directors will help us as we shift development emphasis to our embedded non-volatile re-programmable Nanomech-based memory which will provide the broadest application markets for Cavendish. There are growing demands in automotive, microcontroller and analog/mixed-signal applications, for an ultra-low power and very robust form of CMOS compatible embedded non-volatile memory. Our embedded flash technology is perfectly positioned to fill these demands." "As this is the first IP company that Tallwood has invested in, we were cautious," stated Luis Arzubi of Tallwood Venture Capital. "We came to the conclusion that Cavendish Kinetics has extraordinary technology and is poised to become a leading company in the embedded NVM space." "The market opportunity in the embedded NVM space is exceptional," stated Bart Markus of Wellington Partners. "The superior characteristics of Cavendish's technology along with the excellent team told us that Cavendish would be a leader in this field." Cavendish Kinetics, a spin-off of Cambridge University, and founded by Professor Charles G. Smith, has developed micro-mechanical memory elements and perfected the process of integrating them into standard CMOS, or any other process, creating a more flexible memory option that does not alter the underlying design and process technology. Existing design and IP semiconductor process investments can now be efficiently reused in applications where non-volatile memory needs to be added to existing semiconductor production.