Cloud hosting firm UKFast has made a “significant” investment in Reconfigure.io, a Manchester-based startup which unlocks increased processing potential within servers.
The move makes UKFast the largest single investor in Reconfigure.io’s current funding round, which is worth £500,000.
UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones said: “This is an extraordinarily exciting investment for UKFast and for the future of the internet. There are only so many times you can launch a new chip with increased processing power or add more cores.
“Reconfigure.io is unlocking the technology that supports growth in virtual reality, big data and machine learning. There is an incredible future ahead for these guys.
“Ultimately, we’re committed to speeding up the internet – it’s in our DNA – and Reconfigure.io is facilitating the very technology to make this happen. We’ll be looking to make use of it within our products as we look to integrate greater use of AI and machine learning.
“Reconfigure.io is undoubtedly set to make a huge difference to a lot of businesses.”
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are chips able to perform many tasks at the same time, providing significant speed enhancements over the same code running on traditional CPUs. However, the skills required to program FPGAs are not readily available to most businesses.
Reconfigure.io, which has a 13-strong team in Manchester, lets users program FPGAs with Go – a more simple programming language than the complex code commonly required to program the chips.
The technology means businesses bypass the current need for hard-to-find developers and costly R&D budgets.
Common applications for FPGAs include AI and machine learning, cloud monitoring, data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT), all of which require high-performance compute power to process large datasets.
Reconfigure.io CEO Rob Taylor said: “With this investment, UKFast becomes the single largest investor in this funding round. We look forward to building a working partnership and creating the next generation of computing infrastructure.
“We aim to bring on investors who add value to our business and having this relationship with UKFast opens many major doors.”
Reconfigure.io completed a seed-funding round from a group of senior angel investors from the UK, Switzerland and the US earlier this year.
UKFast is the UK’s largest independently owned hosting provider and is on track to turnover £46 million in 2017.
