Fungible Inc.

Fungible Inc.

Company type	Private (before acquisition)
Industry	Technology
Founded	2015 (2015)
Founder	Pradeep Sindhu, Bertrand Serlet
Fate	Acquired by Microsoft in January 2023
Headquarters	Santa Clara , United States
Key people	Eric Hayes (CEO), Jai Menon (Chief Scientist)
Products	Data Processing Units (DPUs)
Number of employees	200 (2019)

Fungible Inc. is a tech firm located in Santa Clara, California that focuses on delivering hardware and software innovations aimed at boosting the efficiency, dependability, and cost-effectiveness of data center operations.

History

Established in 2015 by Pradeep Sindhu, who co-founded Juniper Networks, along with Bertrand Serlet, previously senior vice president of software engineering at Apple Inc., Fungible concentrates on advancing data processing technologies.

In February 2017, the company obtained $32 million through a Series A financing round led by Mayfield Fund, Walden Riverwood Ventures, and Battery Ventures. By June 2019, Fungible had secured $200 million in Series C funding spearheaded by SoftBank Vision Fund, with contributions from Norwest Venture Partners and prior investors, expanding its team to approximately 200 personnel.

The organization appointed Dr. Jai Menon, formerly chief technology officer at both Dell and IBM, as chief scientist in September 2019. A leadership change occurred in July 2021 when Eric Hayes replaced Pradeep Sindhu as CEO, marking a strategic shift in management.

In January 2023, the acquisition of Fungible by Microsoft was completed to enhance Microsoft’s data center infrastructure and data processing capabilities. After the announcement of this $190 million transaction, shareholder Naveen Gupta initiated legal action alleging possible breaches of fiduciary duty related to the deal.

Products

Fungible designs programmable microprocessors known as Data Processing Units (DPUs), engineered to accelerate workloads centered on data within data centers. Acting as controllers of data flow, these DPUs manage communications between the network and third-party central processing units (CPU) and graphics processing units (GPU). They facilitate a rapid data center fabric interlinking compute and storage servers.

Their processors support the advancement of data center frameworks referred to as composable disaggregated infrastructure, which enhances system architecture by decoupling compute from storage components to overcome constraints imposed by physical servers. This architecture enables flexible pooling and aggregation of resources across a high-speed fabric within the data center.