Cambridge Science Park server architecture specialist Bamboo Systems has closed a $7 million funding round to take its Arm-based technology proposition to greater global heights in an $80 billion global market.

The new money will drive expansion in Research & Development and the company’s go-to-market strategy.

The round has been led by existing investors Seraphim Capital and Opea Holding with support from the UK’s £1.25 billion Future Fund – a UK government funding package designed to support startups driving innovation and development through the coronavirus outbreak. 

Cambridge is home to Bamboo’s European office while its US operations are anchored in San Jose, California.

Arm-based compute platforms have been gaining traction, from AWS expanding its Graviton offerings to Apple’s announcement to switch from Intel to Arm chips for all its Macs. The world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku, is also based on Arm. 

Now, with NVIDIA’s recent announcement that it plans to acquire the company, Arm architecture is poised to further and massively disrupt the status quo in compute.

Bamboo Systems chief executive Tony Craythorne believes the fiunding and the growth strategy will help Arm revolutionise the world of compute. He said: “We are so pleased that Seraphim Capital and Opea Holdings are continuing to invest in Bamboo with another strong show of support for our unique server architecture. 

“We’re also delighted that the UK Future Fund has invested in us as well. These investments underscore the value of our technology that is about to fundamentally change the concept of compute in the data centre.”

Earlier this year, Bamboo announced  its ground breaking B1000N Series of servers. A fully configured B1008N consists of eight servers providing 128 cores, 16 DDR4 memory channels to 512GB DRAM, 24GB/s to 64TB of NVMe storage, fed through 160Gb/s network bandwidth. 

This is delivered in a single rack unit (1U) at approximately 50 per cent of the cost of a legacy Intel-based server, 25 per cent of the energy consumption and 20 per cent of the rack space.

James Bruegger, managing partner of Seraphim Capital said: “We are delighted to continue to support Bamboo Systems at a time when interest in Arm servers has never been higher. 

“With the likes of AWS, Apple and now NVIDIA betting big on Arm, we believe now is the moment for Arm servers to make a major impact on the $80 billion server market.

“Bamboo’s revolutionary server architecture holds the key to delivering the massive space, cost and energy savings that the server market desperately needs.”