Czech spinout DYNANIC secures €550,000 Pre-Seed

Deeptech fund Tensor Ventures has invested €550,000 Pre-Seed funding in the university startup DYNANIC, alongside angel investors from industry leaders who foremerly worked at Dell, AMD, Intel, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The Czech spinout has developed innovative technology that optimizes the use of programmable chips, boosting their throughput and simplifying their integration into high-performance applications. 

This startup marks the first investment from Tensor's second fund, and comes from Brno University of Technology. Their technology hopes to play a role in the development of programmable chips, which, in contrast to regular computer chips, offer the flexibility needed to keep pace with the fast- evolving demands of modern technology and data center environments. DYNANIC allows customers to customise chipsets by selecting specific parameters to meet their needs.

The technology was developed by a team of Czech researchers from Brno University of Technology, led by Pavel Korček.

"Programmable gate chips are very difficult to program, few people know how to do it, because it is not a common software development with its standard paradigms. We have acquired this capability over the past two decades, working on unique research on this very topic at the university and within the CESNET association," he commented. 

"Based on our experience, we founded a company in late 2021, with the university's ownership, with a vision that the client could use FPGA chips without having to have their own dedicated experts."

DYNANIC’s product has been licensed and adopted by all major FPGA chip manufacturers, including Intel and AMD, and Kakao Corp and Kaloom Networks use it  to accelerate applications in data centers. 

The company will now focus on technology for 800 Gbps networks, although chips for such extreme speeds are not yet available.

"We want to accelerate the whole process of our entry among the heavyweights of the global chip industry, targeting so-called hyperscaler companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and IBM," said Korček. "We chose angel investors using the same key. We had a lot of offers for funding, but only some investors had extra experience and valuable contacts, just like Tensor Ventures."