Speedata Raises $44M to Launch First-Ever Chip Designed Specifically for Accelerating Big Data Analytics - Compute's Second Largest Workload

The company's APU (Analytics Processing Unit) redefines analytics infrastructure, accelerating big data workloads as data prep becomes the backbone of AI, potentially transforming the industry

TEL AVIV, Israel, June 3, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Speedata, whose first-of-its-kind Analytics Processing Unit (APU) is designed to accelerate big data analytic workloads by orders of magnitude across industries, today announced the launch of its breakthrough chip. The announcement comes alongside a $44 million Series B funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $114 million. The round includes participation from Walden Catalyst Ventures, 83North, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Pitango First, and Viola Ventures, as well as 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.

Data creation is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years. This data can serve as a game-changer across industries including healthcare, finance, telecommunications, real estate, and other sectors.  Until now, data tasks have been carried out by general purpose processors or even GPUs, often with software optimizations that offer incremental improvements, leading to slow processing times and high operational costs. Adding to this challenge, the rise of generative AI and large language models, which depend on vast, diverse, and often unstructured datasets, has intensified the pressure on today's already squeezed data analytics infrastructure.

Speedata's APU, powered by its custom-designed Callisto chip, removes long-standing bottlenecks that slow down even the most advanced data pipelines, delivering unprecedented acceleration for complex analytics workloads.

"As the volume and complexity of data continue to grow at an unprecedented pace, it's clear that new approaches are needed to complement existing compute architectures," said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel and Managing Partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures. "Speedata's APU is a timely innovation, purpose-built to meet the rising demands of big data analytics at scale. I'm excited to support a company that is unlocking critical performance gains and helping define the future of data infrastructure."

Every component of the chip – from its foundation to its memory and I/O acceleration chains – was designed to remove the core constrictions that plague modern analytics infrastructure and processing. A server with Speedata's APU will replace multiple racks of processors and deliver orders-of-magnitude acceleration for Spark ETL and analytics jobs, while dramatically reducing the cost of running existing data pipelines. This enables large-scale data infrastructures with lower space requirements, reduced power consumption, and faster processing of massive data sets and complex analytics workflows.

"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 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."

Gelvan, a veteran tech executive and serial entrepreneur, brings decades of experience in data infrastructure to his new role. He previously served as CEO of Speedb, acquired by Redis in 2024, and had key leadership roles at SQream, Infinidat, and EMC.

Speedata's transformative chip has already been tested by launch partners from sectors spanning finance, healthcare, insurance, and AdTech – enterprises that depend on mass-scale analytics for business-critical decision-making. For example, using the APU, a pharmaceutical workload was completed in 19 minutes, compared to 90 hours when using a non-specialized processing unit  – a 280x faster result.

"Data analytics is no longer a 'nice to have,' but a critical layer of modern computing, especially in the age of AI," said Eyal Waldman, Co-Founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies and board member at Speedata. "Speedata's APU brings the same kind of leap forward to data analytics that GPUs brought to AI. With the launch of this processor, Speedata is redefining how data-driven workloads are executed — unlocking new efficiencies, scale, savings and impact across industries."

The C200 PCIe card, powered by the Callisto APU, features a PCIe Gen5 x16 interface, is server-agnostic, and is optimized with the Dash software stack for Apache Spark to dynamically redirect jobs to the APU without requiring changes to existing applications or infrastructure.

About Speedata

Speedata has developed the world's first dedicated accelerated processor for big data analytics across industries. Speedata's Analytics Processing Unit (APU) was designed solely to optimize datacenter and cloud-based database and analytic workloads, dramatically improving performance by orders of magnitude while reducing costs, power consumption, and space. Speedata's breakthrough accelerated analytics and database processors provide significant improvement in performance-per-cost for cloud providers, enterprises, private datacenters, and technology providers across industries.

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