Silicon Valley's endorsement for Transitive

Silicon Valley's endorsement for Transitive

20th September, 2004 - Financial Times

By Chris Nuttall

Transitive Corporation, a Manchester University software spin-out, has received a third large endorsement of its technology from Silicon Valley with an $11.5m (£6.5m) Series C funding round.

West Coast-based Accel Partners, which has $3bn under management and has given venture capital support to advance companies such as Real Networks and Macromedia, led the latest round.

Crescendo Ventures, which led the second round, and seed investor Pond Ventures, also took part. All three Silicon Valley VCs have London offices and Pond has concentrated on adding West Coast sales and marketing expertise to the technological ingenuity of British companies. "Transitive is the perfect example of what we do," said Richard Irving, managing partner.

"Research and development has grown from eight to 55 in Manchester, but sales and marketing and the management team is on the West Coast - because that's where the customers are."

Transitive is expected to make customer announcements shortly, but its sales team is understood to have signed up six of the top eight computer manufacturers in the world to use its QuickTransit software emulation product.

This allows applications written for older processors and operating systems to be moved easily on to new equipment. There is usually a trade-off in that such legacy software can run up to 10 times slower, but Transitive says it can run it at 50 to 80 per cent of the speed of the native application.

Its advance means that businesses will be more comfortable and find it easier moving old software on which they depend to the newer equipment computer makers want them to buy.