Money for SiCortex

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HPC hardware startup SiCortex has announced [PDF] that they’ve closed a deal for $10M in venture debt from Hercules Technology Growth Capital to accelerate
production and sales and marketing efforts in response to demand for its products.

According to the announcement the company had taken $21M in financing in two previous rounds from Chevron Technology Ventures, Flagship Ventures, JK&B Capital, and others.

We’ve talked about SiCortex before, but here’s a quick summary from the company

SiCortex has introduced a new concept in high performance computing, limiting power consumption and physical size to gain performance. The company has implemented a complete cluster node on a chip, including six 64-bit processors, multiple memory controllers, a high performance cluster interconnect and a PCIexpress connection to storage and internetworking. A SiCortex cluster node consumes 15 watts of power, an order of magnitude less than the 250 watts used in a conventional cluster node. The SC5832 can perform six trillion operations per second in a cabinet that is less than onethird the size of conventional clusters.

Oh, what’s “venture debt?” I didn’t know either. It’s like venture capital, but instead of trading equity in the company for cash the company repays the loan (which is typically made at a premium over market interest rates) over time.