KALEAO Closes $4.5m Pre-Series A Funding Round and Restructures as Bamboo Systems to Address Market Need for Sustainable Data Centers

Bamboo, with new management team, to deliver the first new server architecture to challenge Intel’s dominance in the data center market


CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom and SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 03, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- KALEAO today announced that it has become Bamboo Systems, a provider of transformative ARM server architecture designed to power the next generation of sustainable data centers. With a new management team in place, Bamboo Systems is poised to introduce its radically different approach to servers in a market with rapidly evolving requirements.

The company has closed a pre-Series A funding round led by Seraphim Capital. The new funding will be used to bring to market the only server designed to give hyperscale performance with ten times the density of today’s Intel-based servers.

The company’s new management team is made up of industry leaders including:

  • Tony Craythorne, CEO, who has over 25 years of experience leading high growth companies in USA, Europe and Asia. Most recently he was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Komprise where under his leadership sales grew twentyfold over the course of one year. Previously, Tony has held executive positions at Nexsan, Hitachi Data Systems, and Brocade.
  • Professor John Goodacre, co-founder and Bamboo System’s Chief Scientific Officer who possesses recognized expertise in the computer science community. John was formerly Director of Technology and Systems at ARM Ltd., and prior to that, a group program manager at Microsoft.
  • Stewart Gallacher, COO, has over 20 years of experience in industrial operations, and most recently was Vice President of Operations with Nexsan.
  • Dr. Geoff Barrall, Executive Chairman, who has over 20 years of experience in the data storage and server markets. He is the founder and CEO of five successful companies including BlueArc, Drobo and Connected Data and has also served on the boards of some of the most recognized names in the industry including Imation, Nexsan and Tacit Networks. Geoff is currently CTO at Hitachi Vantara.

Data center power consumption is becoming a global concern, demanding over 2% of the world’s produced power and generating 2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The high compute demands of machine learning and artificial intelligence are pushing data centers to expand exponentially with power consumption predicted to grow 5x in the next five years.

“The future of the data center lies in the development of nimble solutions that possess the power to achieve results yet are also cognizant of the environmental impacts they produce,” said James Bruegger, Managing Partner, Seraphim Capital, who led the investment round. “As a specialist Space Tech-focused fund, at Seraphim we are investing into some of the most data-hungry companies on the planet. Finding a way to reduce the cost of these companies’ compute and storage demands has become a pressing issue. With its powerful, compact, and energy-conscious design, we believe that Bamboo Systems’ revolutionary new ARM-based servers will have a huge impact both in Space Tech and the wider $80 billion server market. We believe Bamboo Systems is one of the first technological harbingers of the paradigm shift we are about to see in the power consumption of the data center.”

The Bamboo Systems server architecture uses ARM processors in a dense configuration to deliver a massive reduction in power consumption, using one quarter of the power of an equivalent Intel-based system. This new architecture maximizes the performance of modern application design while providing ten times the density of today’s servers, at one third the cost. 

“Bamboo Systems and its new management team are dedicated to changing the future of data center design. ARM has become the architecture of choice for every industry that faces power challenges and we have created a revolutionary server design that brings the energy efficiency, compactness and the scalability of mobile ARM to the data center,” said Tony Craythorne, CEO, Bamboo Systems. “The world’s power grids cannot support the data centers planned for the next five years without a dramatic shift in server design, and Bamboo Systems will lead the industry in meeting this market challenge.”

About Bamboo Systems:
Delivering the first server designed for next generation data centers with hyperscale performance while consuming one-quarter the power of today’s servers, one tenth of the space and at a third of the typical price. Bamboo’s revolutionary server design delivers the energy efficiency, compactness and scalability needs of modern high-performance workloads and processing at the edge. Find out more at www.bamboosystems.io

About Seraphim Capital:
Seraphim is the world’s leading investment group focused on the $360bn global Space sector. The $90m Seraphim Space Fund is the largest Space-focused fund in the world and is backed by the British Business Bank and some of the Space sector’s biggest players. Alongside the Fund, Seraphim also operates Seraphim Space Camp:- a Space-focused accelerator. Since 2016, Seraphim has through its group activities invested in / supported more than 40 early stage Space companies around the world. The Fund’s portfolio includes category-defining companies within the emerging ‘New Space’ ecosystem such as Spire Global, Iceye, ArQit and LeoLabs. Find out more at www.seraphimcapital.com 

For more information:
Joanne Hogue
Smart Connections PR
(410) 658-8246
joanne@smartconnectionspr.com