Israeli chip startup Speedata has raised $44 million in a Series B funding round.

The Tel Aviv-based company is developing APUs (analytics processing units) to accelerate big data analytics and AI workloads, and to date, has raised $114m.

This latest funding round saw participating from existing investors, including Walden Catalyst Ventures, 83North, and Koch Disruptive, and strategic investors, including 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’s APUs are powered by its custom-designed Callisto chip, which the company says addresses longstanding bottlenecks in data infrastructure.

It claims that a server containing its APU can replace multiple racks of processors, delivering “orders-of-magnitude acceleration” for analytics jobs whilst “dramatically reducing” the cost of running existing data pipelines and reducing power consumption.

In one use case cited by Speedata, the APU apparently enabled a pharmaceutical workload to be completed in 19 minutes, compared to 90 hours when using a non-specialized processing unit – a 280x faster result.

"Everyone knows that AI inference will transform our lives, but none of that happens without data analytics first," said Adi Gelvan, Speedata's incoming CEO who will be tasked with leading the company's next growth phase in the wake of the launch.

"To paraphrase the well-known saying; 'diamonds in, diamonds out' – in other words, before AI value can be maximized, 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."