Speedata, a first-of-its-kind Analytics Processing Unit (APU), was designed to advance big data analytic workloads by orders of magnitude across industries. The company announced the launch of its breakthrough chip. This announcement comes alongside a $44 million Series B funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $114 million.
The funding round includes participation from Walden Catalyst Ventures, 83North, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Pitango First, and Viola Ventures, as well as strategic investors including Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel and Managing Partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures, and Eyal Waldman, Co-Founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies.
Problem being addressed: Data creation is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years. This data can serve as a game-changer across industries, including healthcare, finance, telecommunications, real estate, and other sectors. Until now, data tasks have been carried out by general-purpose processors or even GPUs, often with software optimizations that offer incremental improvements, leading to slow processing times and high operational costs. Adding to this challenge, the rise of generative AI and large language models, which depend on vast, diverse, and often unstructured datasets, has intensified the pressure on the already squeezed data analytics infrastructure.
Speedata’s APU: Speedata’s APU, which is powered by its custom-designed Callisto chip, removes long-standing bottlenecks that slow down even the most advanced data pipelines, delivering unprecedented acceleration for complex analytics workloads.
Every component of the chip, from its foundation to its memory and I/O acceleration chains, was designed to remove the core constrictions that plague modern analytics infrastructure and processing. A server with Speedata’s APU will replace multiple racks of processors, delivering orders-of-magnitude acceleration for Spark ETL and analytics jobs, while dramatically reducing the cost of running existing data pipelines. This enables large-scale data infrastructures with lower space requirements, reduced power consumption, and faster processing of massive data sets and complex analytics workflows.
Speedata’s transformative chip has already been tested by launch partners across various sectors, including finance, healthcare, insurance, and AdTech, enterprises that rely on mass-scale analytics for business-critical decision-making. For example, using the APU, a pharmaceutical workload was completed in 19 minutes, compared to 90 hours when using a non-specialized processing unit – a 280x faster result.
The C200 PCIe card, powered by the Callisto APU, features a PCIe Gen5 x16 interface, is server-agnostic, and is optimized with the Dash software stack for Apache Spark, allowing for dynamic job redirection to the APU without requiring changes to existing applications or infrastructure.
KEY QUOTES:
“As the volume and complexity of data continue to grow at an unprecedented pace, it’s clear that new approaches are needed to complement existing compute architectures. Speedata’s APU is a timely innovation, purpose-built to meet the rising demands of big data analytics at scale. I’m excited to support a company that is unlocking critical performance gains and helping define the future of data infrastructure.”
Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel and Managing Partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures
“Everyone knows that AI inference will transform our lives, but none of that happens without data analytics first. To paraphrase the well-known saying: ‘Diamonds in, diamonds out’ – in other words, before AI value can be maximized, the data must be ready. Speedata’s APU is the missing link, unlocking scalable, real-time analytics that power everything from business intelligence to medical breakthroughs to next-gen AI applications. It’s the catalyst AI needed to get to the next era.”
Adi Gelvan, Speedata’s incoming CEO, who is tasked with leading the company’s next growth phase in the wake of the launch. Gelvan previously worked as CEO of Speedb, acquired by Redis in 2024, and had key leadership roles at SQream, Infinidat, and EMC
“Data analytics is no longer a ‘nice to have,’ but a critical layer of modern computing, especially in the age of AI. Speedata’s APU brings the same kind of leap forward to data analytics that GPUs brought to AI. With the launch of this processor, Speedata is redefining how data-driven workloads are executed — unlocking new efficiencies, scale, savings and impact across industries.”
Eyal Waldman, Co-Founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies and board member at Speedata
