Budding Brit chip company gets $30m leg-up

UK chip design start-up Celoxica has received $30m of funding from heavyweight players including Intel, defying the deepest slump to hit the semiconductor industry in 20 years.

Abingdon-based Celoxica said a consortium of firms, including Advent Venture Partners, Cazenove Private Equity, Intel Capital, the Isis College Fund, Quester Venture Capital Trust and Wind River Ventures stumped up the money.

This is the fourth round of funding for the budding firm in the last 18 months, taking the total amount raised to over $60m. It says the money should now take it through to profitability.

Will Golby, VP of communications, said the investment was a massive vote of confidence in them at such a difficult time for the industry: "Our customers recognise that we have a product of real value. The industry is crying out for innovation to give companies real reasons to buy chips again - and we can do that."

Celoxica produces software tools, based on the C programming language, which allows chip manufacturers to drastically slash the time it takes to design processors.

It claims its tools allow software developers to design chips around applications, making it much easier to tailor chips to software and potentially increasing the number of people able to develop chips by a factor of ten.

Currently, Celoxica claims, there are just 300,000 hardware developers in the world, making chip development slow and expensive.

Golby added: "We are addressing the skills gap, and in doing so we're making ourselves more attractive to investors who see we are making the market that much bigger."

Celoxica's customer base already includes the likes of Marconi, Nortel and Sony, but it refuses to say how much it earns or when it will become profitable.

The company, founded in 1996, now has offices in Silicon Valley, Singapore and Japan, as well as the UK.