Gaterocket gets $3mn in venture funding

Bedford, USA: GateRocket Inc. has completed a $3 million Series-A round of financing of led by New Atlantic Ventures, Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation (MTDC), and Long River Ventures. Seed-stage investors and Angel groups also participated to bring the total GateRocket has now raised to $4.5 million. This round of financing will enable the company to engage more customers and broadly deploy its compelling solution for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) verification and debug.

Electronics companies are shifting their use of semiconductors from very expensive custom chips called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to FPGAs. Today, 96 out of every 100 chip design projects use FPGAs. New FPGAs have become far more capable than earlier versions with capacity and performance doubling each year, making them the favorite for many market segments. The skyrocketing complexity of these next-generation FPGAs has created a crisis since design engineers experience extreme difficulty getting their chips to work with existing software design tools. GateRocket solves this problem with a new product that cuts time-to-market by streamlining design verification and slashing system debug time by 10-30X versus existing methods.

"We are very excited about GateRocket's opportunity given the rapid move to FPGAs and the challenges that electronic engineers face when bringing products to market," said Todd Hixon, Managing Director of New Atlantic Ventures. "FPGA semiconductor use is at an inflection point and GateRocket's product enables aggressive use of these devices by OEMs and therefore is a catalyst for accelerated FPGA market growth."

With this financing, GateRocket will increase its team in its Bedford Mass. office by adding both sales and development resources. "We are looking forward to expanding our team to satisfy the demand for our products," said Dave Orecchio, GateRocket President and CEO.

GateRocket's RocketDrive is a faster and more accurate verification and debugging solution for FPGAs than traditional software-only approaches. The RocketDrive offers the ability to exhaustively validate and test an FPGA design before committing to production by exposing bugs you would only find in the lab early in the design phase, enabling shorter product development times, higher product quality and improved performance.

The solution is very powerful since it allows the designer to place any portions of the FPGA design into the RocketDrive and seamlessly integrate it with their verification platform. This allows the FPGA to be used natively to (1) speed verification by replacing FPGA software models with actual hardware; (2) investigate hardware bugs and test alternatives; and (3) run application level software against a Device Native representation of the design.

The RocketDrive takes minutes to install in any Linux PC and integrates seamlessly with the user's existing design and verification environment. The RocketDrive complements software design tools from the leading design automation tool vendors including Cadence Design Systems, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Synplicity, and FPGA vendor tools from Altera and Xilinx.