Squaring Up with Tech Giants: Speedata’s $44M Victory in the Race to Accelerate Big Data Processing and AI Workloads

In an exciting development for the tech industry, Speedata, a startup based in Tel Aviv, has raised an impressive $44 million in a Series B funding round. This has brought the total capital amassed to a significant sum of $114 million. Leading the funding charge were its existing investors—including Walden Catalyst Ventures, 83North, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Pitango First, and Viola Ventures. Other contributors include strategic investors, such as Lip-Bu Tan and Eyal Waldman, who hold high-ranking positions within Intel and Mellanox Technologies, respectively.

Speedata’s groundbreaking APU caters to Apache Spark workloads and is part of a strategic plan to support all major data analytics platforms. Indeed, Gelvan’s ambitious vision is for APUs to become the go-to for data analytics. The startup already has several significant companies trialling its APU, although names remain under wraps for now.

The chip pioneers are set to officially launch their APU at the forthcoming Databricks’ Data & AI Summit in June, when it will take the spotlight for the first time. Drawing on a specific case study, Speedata illustrated the sheer superiority of its technology. An APU completed a pharmaceutical workload in 19 minutes, dramatically faster than the 90 hours it took using a non-specialized processing unit , which is a speed improvement of a whopping 280 times.

Since its last successful fundraising feat, Speedata has accomplished several key milestones, including finalizing the design and manufacturing of its first APU in late 2024. ‘We’ve moved from concept to testing and can now proudly say we have working hardware that we are currently launching’ stated Gelvan. As they stride ahead in the AI and data processing arena, expect to see Speedata’s name cropping up a lot more in the tech headlines.