Kinetica, a startup that builds databases that harness fast graphical processing chips to perform everyday business applications, now has $50 million in new funding.
The San Francisco company is banking that increasing numbers of mainstream computing jobs will run on Nvidia (nvda, -1.21%) graphical processing units (GPUs), which until recently were used primarily for video games and animation. Most business data-crunching jobs have thus far relied on more general-purpose Central Processing Units (CPUs), typically Intel (intc, +0.60%) X86 chips.
“GPUs normally had been all about video gaming and shading pixels on TVs and monitors,” Amit Vij, co-founder and CEO of Kinetica told Fortune. That started to change when Nvidia, the leading provider of GPUs, released its Cuda language, which made the processing power of these chips more broadly applicable, he added.
Now a handful of startups including Kinetica, Sqream, and MapD are building databases that use GPUs to parse all sorts of data, including the sort of information normally processed by traditional relational databases from Oracle (orcl, -0.12%) and Microsoft (msft,…