Start-Up Profile: rENIAC

The name of rENIAC, Inc. comes from ENIAC, the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S and introduced in 1946.

The privately-held company is based in San Jose, CA and was founded in 2012.

It is comprised of entrepreneurs with data, software and systems experience from companies such as LinkedIn, Riverbed, IBM and mainly Xilinx, in All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs, MPSoCs and 3D ICs enabling smarter, connected, and differentiated systems and networks.

The two co-founders are originated from India:

CEO Prasanna Sundararajan, previously at Xilinx since 1999 ending as senior staff HPC systems architect

CTO Kulkarni Chidamber formerly senior staff design engineer at Xilinx during nine years
Architect Pradeep Mishra coming also from Xilinx where he was for around 8 years as softwaredevelopment manager

Among the board’s member there is the famous Vic Mahadevan also originated from India, now CEO of Punchh and formerly chief strategy officer for NetApp and also currently at the board of Violin Memory.

For this start-up we have only found a $28,000 seed funding round on July 10, 2013 from Alchemist Accelerator. Other investors are Menlo and RSCM (Righ Side Capital Management, LLC.)

It’s not easy to understand precisely what is preparing stealthy rENIAC that claimed 40+ patents and product development of 60+ man years.

Here are three sentences found on the company’s web site:

“We are redefining data center architecture for any application, any server, and any data store.”
“rENIAC’s gateway product enabled the customer’s existing servers to scale and handle billions of transactions at 50% of the cost when compared to alternative solutions.”
“rENIAC’s Line Rate Data Ingestion technology proved to the customer that within a SLA, we can analyze large volumes of data as well as enrich the information.”

The two co-founders have been assigned a patent filed on April 7, 2015 on “heterogeneous memory system” that includes a network interface card, a main memory arrangement, a first-level cache, and a memory management unit.