Arm server vendor Bamboo Systems has raised $7m in a new funding round.

The investment came from existing backers Seraphim Capital and Opea Holding, but also included support from the UK's £1.25 billion ($1.6bn) Future Fund. The government scheme was designed to support start-ups during the Covid-19 pandemic, offering convertible loans between £125,000 and £5 million that can be repaid in cash or equity.

Arming up

“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,” said Tony Craythorne, chief executive officer, Bamboo Systems.

“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 center.”

We spoke to Craythorne earlier this year, when the company announced its B1000N Series of servers. The servers include an NXP Layerscape LX2160A with 16 Cortex-A72 CPU cores running at up to 2.2GHz. A fully-specced B1008N chassis features 128 cores, 16 DDR4 memory channels to 512GB DRAM, and 64TB of NVMe storage.

"Everybody else has just taken an Arm processor and dropped it into an Intel socket," Craythorne told DCD.

"HPE have an Arm server, Lenovo have an Arm server, Supermicro have an Arm server - but all they've done is dropped it into an x86 architecture. And so you get some of the benefits of Arm, but not all of them. And what we've done is completely different."

The investment round comes during an eventful year for Arm - with the chip architecture being chosen for Apple computers, in the same month that it was featured in the world's most powerful supercomputer. Then, just last month, GPU giant Nvidia announced its intention to acquire the Arm company for $40bn.

“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,” said James Bruegger, managing partner at Seraphim Capital.

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