Trondheim-Oslo 02. September 2009
ProVenture Seed AS and Investinor AS with co-investors fund Numascale AS with NOK 30 million
Numascale is in the final stage of development of a revolutionary new interconnect for clusters. The technology called NumaConnect™ brings high scalability and enterprise system capabilities to clusters. This will significantly improve utilization of compute resources for high performance compute clusters through reduced power consumption and cost of operations. The technology unifies the programming paradigm for small and large scale systems with resulting reduction in software development time.
Numascale has already established collaborations with universities and a large oil company for early application testing of the products.
Numascale AS was started as a spin-off from Dolphin Interconnect Solutions ASA in June 2008.
Investinor AS and ProVenture Seed will invest up to NOK 30 million in the company. Co-investors are the ICT-entrepreneurs Svein Anders Tunheim (Chipcon) and Helge Risnes (InfoCare), Numascale employees and existing shareholders. The investment plan was signed on the 24. June 2009.
The first installment of the investment is done and Investinor and ProVenture each own 29% of Numascale AS and are the largest and controlling shareholders.
Partner Hans Olav Torsen from ProVenture Seed (Chairman), Investment Director Steinar Fossen (Investinor), Svein Anders Tunheim, Helge Briseid Risnes and Tor Alfheim serve on the new board in Numascale AS.
About Numascale AS
Numascale AS was founded in 2008 and develops advanced computer system interconnect technology. Numascale's NumaConnect™ technology enables scalable server computer systems to be built at a fraction of the price of current enterprise systems. NumaConnect allows high volume manufactured server boards to be used as building blocks for systems with features that are only found in the high-end enterprise servers. NumaConnect includes full support for virtualization of processing, memory and IO resources and can be used with standard operating systems like Linux, Windows and Solaris.
About ProVenture
ProVenture is a national seed fund of NOK 335 million investing in early-stage, technology-based Norwegian companies with an international potential in ICT, petroleum, energy and maritime, material and process technology. ProVenture will give the investors a return through an efficient link up of venture capital, commercial expertise, international networks, incubators and entrepreneurs.
About Investinor AS
Investinor AS invests in Norwegian based, high potential companies that are internationally oriented and in the phases ranging from early growth to expansion. The company has BNOK 2,2 under management and focus on companies within the energy, cleantech, maritime, marine and travel sectors. Cleantech and marine sectors are of particular interest, with i.e. MNOK 500 earmarked for the marine sector. Investinor AS has a co-investment strategy and contributes up to 49% in each round, and can take up to 49% equity ownership of a portfolio company. Investinor is fully owned by Innovation Norway, which is owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry.
Contacts:
Investinor: Rune Sævik, Comunications Manager, email: , phone: +47 906 33 256
ProVenture Seed. Hans Olav Torsen, Partner, email: , phone: +47 901 90 678
Numascale AS: Kåre Løchsen, CEO, email: , phone: +47 950 88 731
