News
March 14, 2006 - RapidMind completes a round of financing from BDC Venture Capital
Software platform allows applications to take advantage of a new generation of high performance processors
Waterloo, Canada - March 14, 2006 - RapidMind Inc. announces that they have secured financing from BDC Venture Capital, enabling the company to aggressively pursue its target markets.
“Performance improvements in the traditional processor market have fallen off dramatically”, said RapidMind President and CEO, Ray DePaul. “There is a new generation of highly scalable processors such as the GPU (the processor found on everyday video accelerator cards), the IBM Cell, and other multi-core processors that can offer an order of magnitude faster computation. The performance advantage on some of these processors is doubling every year.”
These processors are not programmable by traditional techniques, however, and achieving the potential performance would normally require a detailed understanding of processor hardware as well as sophisticated parallel programming techniques. RapidMind has created a platform that allows software developers to use well understood methods to target these new processors. The result is that developers can easily create software that the RapidMind platform will run in parallel on any of the supported processors. RapidMind makes it simple to create high performance applications.
“Application vendors in the areas of game development, image processing, content generation, and scientific computation are excited by these new processors but extremely concerned about the programming challenges. RapidMind solves this problem.” said DePaul.
“RapidMind is a great example of the kind of innovative software enterprise which BDC Technology Seed Investment Group targets for investment.” said Victor Scutaru, Director Venture Capital, Technology Seed Investments Group of the Business Development Bank of Canada, a founding financial partner of RapidMind Inc.
About RapidMind
RapidMind provides a software development platform that allows applications to take advantage of a new generation of high performance processors, including the GPU, IBM Cell, and other mult-icore processors. RapidMind enables applications to realize the performance breakthroughs offered by these processors. Based in Waterloo, Canada, RapidMind is a venture-backed private company that is built on over 5 years of advanced research and development. For more information on RapidMind, visit www.RapidMind.net.
About BDC Venture Capital
The BDC Technology Seed Investments Group, of the Business Development Bank of Canada, provides financing for the creation of innovative technology businesses with high-growth potential. BDC, through its Venture Capital Group, is a major venture capital investor in Canada, active at every stage of the company’s development cycle, from seed through expansion, with a focus on technology-based businesses that have high growth potential and that are positioned to become dominant players in their markets. BDC Venture Capital has been involved in venture capital since 1975 and has to date invested in more than 400 different companies. It currently manages approximately $550 million in venture capital assets invested in the areas of Life Sciences, Telecommunications, Information Technology, Advanced Technologies and Funds Investments. For more information, visit http:www.bdc.ca