INSIGHTS / News

• The investment syndicate, led by Bloc Ventures (Bloc), was joined by the Bristol Private Equity Club (BPEC), and a successful Seedrs crowdfund campaign.
• The investment will enable YellowDog’s Limitless Compute technology to now expand its capabilities from animation rendering today to multiple vertical market most notably financial services.

YellowDog, recognised as one of the top 15 Disrupter Businesses in the South West, has closed its most recent investment round with Bloc Ventures as lead investor. Bloc, founded by industry veterans from ARM Holdings and Vodafone, identified the significant potential in YellowDog, and lead this fundraise to initiate their next stage of expansion.

Known throughout the animation and visual effects industry globally for their Limitless Compute technology which helps artists and animators render their CGI faster than ever before, YellowDog’s award winning software platform is disrupting the way businesses access enormous amounts of compute. This round of funding will launch their next target: big batch processing in the heart of the financial services.

Gareth Williams, YellowDog Founder

Gareth Williams, the founder of YellowDog, commented:

“The backing of Bloc proves that we are on the right trajectory with our offering. This fundraise will help YellowDog begin to unlock the massive potential in a new sectors starting with financial services. Having Bloc as an investor means we can begin to leverage both their expertise and their network to support our growth. Having existing investors from Seedrs and Bristol Private Equity Club follow-on their initial investment means that they can clearly see the growth potential of YellowDog.”

YellowDog’s unique technology allows businesses to securely harness the underutilised computer power that already exists within their organisation and use it for their big batch processes.

And if that isn’t enough for the jobs at hand, the YellowDog Platform can then be configured to securely burst the workload out to the cloud to provide limitless compute. YellowDog is more flexible than virtualisation, more resilient than high performance compute clusters, less expensive to deploy than hyperconvergence and is naturally vendor agnostic.

David Leftley, CTO and co-founder at Bloc, commented:

“Bloc looks to invest in deep technology that can scale across many verticals. The ability of YellowDog’s technology to spin-up massive high performance computing grids has been already been proven in the animation market and the potential to scale into other markets such as financial services and engineering fits perfectly with our investment strategy. YellowDog’s use of AI and Machine learning to understand workloads is a big differentiator in this market. Bloc will now work closely with Gareth and the team to unlock their full potential.”

This investment will now drive YellowDog expansion into this huge industry, enabling investment in recruitment, technological development, and strategic vision.