SAN JOSE — Ethernovia, Inc., an automotive software startup, has completed its A-round financing of $64 million. The funding round consists of multiple investors, including Porsche Automobile Holding SE (Porsche SE), Qualcomm Ventures, VentureTech Alliance, AMD Ventures, Western Digital Capital, Fall Line Capital, Taiwania Capital, ENEA Capital and others.
As vehicle architectures evolve from domain-centric controllers, networking solutions must concurrently evolve to support higher data rates of advanced vehicle applications while meeting demand for improved reliability and security. Such advanced applications include Advanced Driver-Assisted Systems (ADAS), autonomous driving (AD) and a rich ecosystem of customer software delivered Over the Air (OTA).
Ethernovia is developing a seamless, holistic and streamlined hardware and software system that meets this demand through the integration of advanced networking features targeting the future of software-defined vehicles.
“We are extremely grateful for the vote of confidence this group of industry-leading investors has given Ethernovia’s technology and vision for the future of the connected car,” said Ramin Shirani, Ethernovia co-founder and CEO. “We take great pride in developing the cutting-edge network architecture to power the car of the future. These innovations set a new industry expectation in what can be achieved in meeting the cost, power and flexibility that car manufacturers and consumers demand in new vehicles.”
“The trends towards electrification and connectivity in the automotive industry as well as developments in the field of automated driving result in ever increasing requirements on fast and secure data transmission from a wide variety of sources in vehicles and to the cloud,” said Lutz Meschke, Porsche SE board of management member responsible for investment management. “To address these central challenges of automotive transformation, Ethernovia offers technologically leading, integrated Ethernet chips with high bandwidth and advanced security solutions for the energy-efficient processing of large amounts of data. With our investment in Ethernovia, we are excited to support the world-leading experts in bringing the latest Ethernet technologies to vehicles around the world.”
“The connected car of the future requires high bandwidth and secure in-vehicle communication,” said Carlos Kokron, vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and managing director, Qualcomm Ventures Americas. “Ethernovia’s solution transforms the automobile’s communication network by providing a reliable, standards-based, high-speed connectivity needed to enable the software-defined vehicle. We’re excited to invest in Ethernovia to accelerate the transformation of automotive.”
Ethernovia was founded in 2018 by Shirani and a team of experienced semiconductor innovators, including Roy Myers, senior vice president of engineering; Hossein Sederat, chief technology officer; and Darren Engelkemier, vice president of silicon engineering. Today, the company’s executive team also includes Christopher Mash, vice president of business development, and Klaas Bult, vice president of data acquisition.
