Comprimato, a Brno-based provider of JPEG2000 GPU-based compression solutions, has raised 200.000 euros in seed funding. Prague-based venture fund Credo Ventures and Y Soft VC are the backers of this project and their offerings are meant to aid the startup in their international sales and expansion.
“We have the product but we need to boost sales and we also need to work on the technology side to broaden our portfolio,” Jiri Matela, CEO of Comprimato told inventures.eu.
Meet Comprimato
The young company provides fast compression algorithms in form of SDK. (Read more about it here). “Our customers are manufacturers of different video and image processing tools,” said Matela. “These customers are integrating our code in order to speed up video and image processing in their own product.”
Yet, that’s not all. “We are focusing on the professional video market right now, but soon we would like to expand to markets such as government (e.g. satellite images) or medical applications. We would like to penetrate the consumer video market too. And we certainly work to broaden our product portfolio”, he said.
Comprimato started sales about a month ago, and they expect to break-even at the end of next year. With the extra 200.000 euros they just received, and investors onboard, who have “expertise in international sales, PR and networking”, the company might soon get to leave its mark in the technological world.
How did it start?
After more than four years of joint history, Matela and his team have been working to leverage the power of graphic processing units (GPUs) for image compression. “In fact I have started working on the project as an intern at EVL [the Electronic Visualization Laboraty in Chicago] back in 2008,” he said. “We did some technology demonstrations last year and we received very positive feedback from the industry. So we decided to start the company,” he added.
Comprimato is a spin-off from CESNET, a Prague-based research institute. Matela said that he was recently asked why he and his team didn’t continue doing research but started a company instead. Matela’s reply came with no further ado. “We thought our algorithms are too good not to try,” he said. “It is an exaggeration,” he then added, “but the truth is that we feel that parallel algorithm design really is our thing.”
We’re looking forward to hearing more from the Czech startup soon!
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