Investing in Innovative Software Development and Commercialization
Backgrounder
The Government of Canada is making smart investments that will create jobs, grow our economy, and provide more opportunities for the middle class and those working hard to join it. A $1.8 million investment for Solido Design Automation Inc. (Solido) to develop and commercialize their machine learning-based software products helps place Canada as a world-leading innovation economy.
Funding provided through Western Economic Diversification Canada’s (WD) Western Innovation (WINN) Initiative is a co-investment with Solido to help meet the needs of a growing electronics market.
Solido develops innovative software to automate the design of electronic chips used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, TVs, computers and automobiles. Their customers include IBM, Broadcom, Nvidia, Cypress, Microsemi, Applied Micro and more, who supply chips used in the billions of electronic devices sold each year.
New software will save significant time and money for chip design, and substantially increase productivity, chip yield and performance. This product has the potential to be 100 times faster and more accurate than existing methods of chip design, using innovative machine learning algorithms, a branch of artificial intelligence. Advantages for software customers will translate into improved products available to the public.
Solido has recently moved their Saskatoon headquarters into a 13,000 square foot, state-of-the-art software facility in the Innovation Place technology park, which provides a creative, collaborative environment for Solido’s team of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians. Solido’s success in the software market will lead them to grow to 105 employees in 2017, doubling their technology teams. The project funded under WINN is expected to create 15 highly qualified software engineering positions in Saskatoon, and will invest overall $3.6 million in research and development of the targeted software product.
In recent months, Solido has been recognized as one of the Deloitte 2016 Technology Fast 50, as the number one fastest growing technology company in Saskatchewan and 34th in Canada. They have achieved ranking as a top five product for the fifth consecutive year by attendees of the electronic design industry’s largest annual conference. President and CEO Amit Gupta was also named as a finalist for the 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Technology and Communications category, Prairies Region.
WINN aims to bridge the gap identified in pre-commercialization funding for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), assisting them in the process of bringing their ideas to market-ready products, processes, and services.
Announced in October 2013, WINN will invest $100 million over 5 years in the form of repayable contributions to for-profit SMEs based in Western Canada. With federal support, all projects aim to be on the market within 3 years.
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