Israel-based startup Speedata has secured $44m (NIS154m) in a Series B funding round to advance its chip technology tailored for data analytics workloads.

The latest investment brings the company’s total capital raised to $114m.

The round saw participation from investors including Walden Catalyst Ventures, 83North, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Pitango First, and Viola Ventures.

Strategic investors also ed the round, among them Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel and managing partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures, and Eyal Waldman, co-founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies.

Speedata is known for its Analytics Processing Unit (APU), which is designed to significantly accelerate big data analytic workloads across various industries.

Concurrently, the company also announced the launch of a new chip aimed at enhancing big data analytics.

The APU, powered by Speedata’s custom-designed Callisto chip, addresses longstanding bottlenecks in data pipelines, offering substantial acceleration for complex analytics tasks.

The chip has been tested by companies in sectors such as finance, healthcare, insurance, and AdTech, the company said.

The newly introduced C200 PCIe card features a PCIe Gen5 x16 interface and is designed to be compatible with a range of server environments.

It is integrated with Speedata’s Dash software stack for Apache Spark, allowing job redirection to the APU without requiring modifications to existing applications or infrastructure.

Adi Gelvan, Speedata’s incoming CEO, said: “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 maximised, 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.”