Liquid Instruments is well positioned to execute on its expansion strategy and disrupt the test and measurement sector and lead the industry through the much-needed transition from hardware to software.”ĥ tips for scaling your green startup during a funding drought “We see tremendous potential for their platform to continue to grow and evolve, benefitting more industries over time. “Liquid Instruments’ Australian-developed software-defined approach is the manifestation of an ambitious plan targeting a vital market that has suffered from a deficit of innovation and imagination,” added Robert Routley, CEO, Acorn Capital. We are excited by Liquid’s continued growth and look forward to strengthening our collaboration.” “This technology has the potential to deliver mission critical functionality that can provide value to our customer. “Liquid Instruments is creating a versatile test and measurement platform that is customizable and efficient,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, in a statement. Liquid Instruments has to date raised $50 million. Led by Acorn Capital, it also includes strategics like Lockheed Martin Ventures and Powerhouse Ventures, as well as previous backers Spirit Super/ANU Connect Ventures, MA Growth Ventures, Significant Capital Ventures and Boman Enterprises. The investors in this round also are a testament to its traction. And it's finding a lot of traction in all of them, with sales up four-fold in the last year. Its customers rather span research and education through to government labs and industrial businesses, with applications including aerospace, defense, semiconductor, lidar and quantum computing. Now that they are larger, we can slice up the chip into more functions, and have them all work together."Īlthough this is bringing down the price of testing devices, it's not exactly putting Liquid Instruments into the category of electronics companies building tools for hobbyists. "What has been done previously on analogue devices, and distributed across many chips, are now all on FPGA chips. That's because its IP is not about the chips but about how they're used to work "at the crossroads of analogue circuitry and digital processing," he said. Today those chips are Xilinx chips from AMD, but the company is open to using "whatever the chip du jour might be" said Shaddock. The devices use standard input ports and are based on flexible FPGA chip architecture. This Series B round of equity funding, which I understand values the company at north of $100 million, will help Liquid Instruments continue to build out more hardware models, and to write more software-based testing tools for those devices. Moore's Law is alive and well here: The startup's unique selling point is that it has built a new take on testing equipment by translating much of the process into software that sits on hardware that's faster, many times smaller and less costly than traditional testing equipment, and provides other kinds of flexibility, such as more dynamic visualizations, diagnostics, programability and the ability to work on the tests in the cloud. It's been on a roll with sales up 4x this year, with customers of its devices including NASA (where the founders first worked on the concept), Google and Qualcomm, Stanford and Duke, and the U.S.'s National Institute of Standards and Technology. Now, a startup called Liquid Instruments that's devised a set of software and hardware to help engineers carry out one aspect of their work - testing - more efficiently is announcing a capital injection of $28.5 million to fuel its growth. Engineering innovations are a critical cornerstone in the evolution of technology, but ironically there haven't been as many innovations in engineers' tooling itself.
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