Robert Bosch Venture Capital invests in USD 6 million funding round of Sunlight

Stuttgart, Germany – Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH (RBVC), the venture capital arm of the Bosch Group, has participated in a 6 million US Dollar financing round in Cambridge (UK) based Sunlight.io, investing together with OpenOcean, a pan-European early stage investor in B2B software that was founded by the early investors and founders of MySQL. The proceeds of the round will be used to scale the company’s business particularly in the US market.

As businesses increasingly rely upon data-intensive applications like analytics, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to run their core business processes, Sunlight’s technology can cut the infrastructure costs of running these applications by 70%.
“While AI and IoT is increasingly becoming an essential part of people’s lives, companies like Bosch have to process unprecedented amounts of data” says RBVC Managing Director Dr. Ingo Ramesohl. “As Sunlight brings all the benefits of virtualization to any high-performance workload in the cloud as well as to applications at the edge, it has great strategic relevance for Bosch to streamline operations”.

Virtualization Technology Enables High-Performance Cloud

Despite significant advances in storage and networking hardware, existing cloud and virtualization technologies are not architected to support the digestion of massive amounts of data I/O necessary, and are too bloated to run in resource-constrained edge environments. This results in large overinvestments in IT infrastructure, and failed cloud migrations. And with data volumes forecast by IDC to increase 4x by 2025 and 75% of data collection forecast to move to the edge according to Gartner, Sunlight’s technology will become increasingly mission critical.

“Data volumes are skyrocketing. It’s not uncommon to see enterprises hike their infrastructure costs up to 10x for some data-intensive applications when they move to the cloud. Cloud has been instrumental in unlocking greater IT flexibility, and now we at Sunlight are equipping it to rise to the challenge of supporting the applications that consume that data.” says Sunlight Founder and CEO Julian Chesterfield, a virtualization pioneer. “By transforming cloud infrastructures, we’re allowing businesses to achieve huge efficiencies, cost savings and performance gains for today’s most highly demanding workloads – from genetic sequencing and automated drone monitoring to rendering hi-definition movies.”

World class team with game changing technology

Chesterfield was one of the architects of Xen virtualization, the original foundation of many of today’s most popular cloud services. “We are very impressed with what the team has been able to achieve so far and are excited to support them going forward” says Ramesohl. Chesterfield adds: “With RBVC as a global deep tech investor and OpenOcean as a leading European data infrastructure investor, we are well set up for rapid growth in 2021”.