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EDA Startup Synfora Gears Up for Product Launch and Fundraising
By Michelle Tsai
2/3/2004
Mountain View, Calif. -- With a handful of customers, electronic design automation startup Synfora is preparing for a product launch in March and a round of financing later this year. The firm plans to raise between $6 million and $12 million in the next six months, according to CEO Simon Napper.

Based on technology first developed at Hewlett-Packard Labs, Synfora has developed software tools to enable engineers to automatically go from implementation algorithms to silicon design. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has so far received $6 million in Series A funding from Foundation Capital, US Venture Partners, and Hewlett-Packard.

US Venture Partners and Foundation Capital have already committed to the Series B round, which is likely to be around $10 million, said Mr. Napper. He said he will begin to raise the funding in April. Mr. Napper was previously CEO of InnoLogic Systems, an EDA firm in the verification space.

In the meantime, Synfora has a lot of work in the next couple months to ready itself for fundraising. "Before we go out, we want to be able to announce some customers," said Mr. Napper. The firm has a few customers at the moment, one of which has completed a chip design using Synfora's software and is about to tape out. The CEO also said he plans to keep headcount low while fundraising to demonstrate financial discipline.

The new capital will be used for R&D, particularly since the firm still sees many opportunities in its technology portfolio; the first product will represent less than a third of the startup's 86 patents. Synfora also plans to improve the performance of its tool. For example, the first version of Synfora's PICO software in March will save engineers 25% to 30% of the time they spend on this portion of the design cycle. In the long term, Synfora intends to put out a version of PICO that reduces time by 75%.

Potential customers for Synfora include companies doing algorithm-based designs, including set top boxes, cell phones, DVDs, digital cameras, wireless devices, and security applications.

The firm's founding team includes: CTO Vinod Kathail, the former R&D program manager and a principal scientist in the Compiler and Architecture Research program at HP Labs; chief architect Shail Aditya, formerly chief architect of the synthesis back-end of the PICO project at HP Labs; and director of hardware Craig Gleason, who was previously the operations manager for customer engagements, customer interfaces, and hardware development at HP's Embedded Computing Solutions Operation, which, along with HP Labs, incubated Synfora.

http://www.synfora.com