Austin—VMWare announced Thursday it intends to acquire Bitfusion, a startup with offices in Austin, TX and Silicon Valley that makes software aimed at optimizing the way hardware such as graphic processing units are used by applications. Terms were not disclosed.
Bitfusion’s software is particularly useful for companies using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology in applications, according to VMWare (NYSE: [[ticker:VMW]]), which announced the deal in a blog post. The startup’s software virtualizes hardware acceleration, a term for speeding up computer processing. Bifusion has focused on GPUs for its virtualization, which allows for sharing of resources among multiple GPUs, though it also works with other accelerators such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), VMWare says.
It’s been VMWare’s strategy to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to virtualize hardware accelerators, the company said in the post. Bitfusion joined as a partner of a VMWare program in 2018.
Bitfusion was founded in 2015 with San Antonio, TX-based Geekdom Fund as an early investor. That year it participated in the now-closed Techstars Cloud accelerator in San Antonio. Bitfusion announced a $5 million Series A funding round led by Vanedge Capital in 2017, in which Geekdom also invested. The company has raised approximately $8 million, according to securities filings.
VMWare was founded in 1998 and acquired by EMC in 2004. In turn, Dell Technologies (NYSE: [[ticker:DELL]]) acquired EMC in 2016, and controlled 80.5 percent of VMWare’s stock as of Feb. 1, according to a securities filing. VMWare plans to integrate Bitfusion into its vSphere service when the deal closes, for which VMWare didn’t provide a timeline.
