A Chat with Jonathan Friedmann, Co-Founder & CEO at Data Analytics Company: Speedata

Speedata is a semiconductor company developing a dedicated accelerated processor for data analytics called an APU (Analytics Processing Unit).

The next-generation processing unit is designed to optimize performance, efficiency, and scale for analytics and database workloads – by far the greatest workloads enterprises face today. A server with Speedata’s APU will replace multiple racks of CPUs, dramatically reducing cost power and space.

Alternatively, the APU may be used for productivity gains, increasing performance by 1-2 orders of magnitude, allowing organizations to process substantially larger and more complex data sets. In this age of big data, Speedata’s accelerator will empower industries to execute data analytics faster, more efficiently and economically, and with less energy consumption – including healthcare, finance, telecommunications, travel, and many others.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Data is the “new gold,” and there is a lot of it: Every year, the amount of data grows exponentially. But there is no dedicated chip specifically designed to process and analyze this explosion of data.

Most organizations rely on CPUs to analyze their data, and while CPUs have improved substantially, they simply aren’t able to keep up with the amount of data in today’s data age. Indeed, “Moore’s Law,” which states that transistor density in CPUs will double every two years, no longer holds.

Analytics and database processing represents an even bigger workload than Artificial Intelligence (AI) with regard to dollars spent. Though we are seeing a lot of innovation in the AI processing space, industries are still anxiously seeking solutions for accelerating database analytics, which can serve as a huge competitive advantage for cloud providers, enterprises, and datacenters. This is where Speedata comes in – we developed a dedicated processing unit designed to accelerate big data analytics workloads in this age of big data.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Speedata has designed a solution that addresses a critical pain point in the market. We have received substantial investments from significant industry leaders such as Lip-Bu Tan, Managing Partner of Walden Catalyst Ventures and Eyal Waldman, former CEO of Mellanox Technologies.

We emerged from stealth in September 2021, announcing $70 million in funding, and already have a prototype demonstrating our phenomenal performance.

What can we hope to see from Speedata in the future?

In today’s landscape, every business depends on reliable big data and this need will only increase. However, the hardware meant to process this data is underperforming.

Speedata will change industries for years to come, enabling pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the development of drugs, telecommunication companies to provide better products to their consumers, advertisers to better address their target market, and many other significant use cases from industries across the board.