Sigasi announces first round funding

High tech company financed by Belgian venture capital

Ghent, Belgium - July 29, 2010 - Sigasi, a Ghent-based high tech EDA start-up, announced that it has closed its first round of funding. The investors in this round are Baekeland Fund II, the venture seed fund of Ghent University, business angels, and the team.

Sigasi was founded in January of 2008 by two PhD's from Ghent University. The company was initially financed by seed capital provided by the founders, by subsidies from the Flemish government via the Agency for Innovation through Science and Technology (IWT), and by a mezzanine loan from Flemish Innovation Fund (Vinnof).

Sigasi innovates in the domain of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) in several ways. First, it produces a novel intelligent development environment (IDE) for digital circuit design. The idea of this IDE is based on modern software development platforms, like Visual Studio and Eclipse. Second, Sigasi is a native web-based company that employs an innovative low-touch sales process. The whole process, including distribution, sales, communication and support, occurs over the Internet. This is very different from the traditional direct sales methods in EDA. After two years of development and a successful beta-testing program with several customers, Sigasi released its flag ship product Sigasi HDT in January 2010. Sigasi HDT had a successful start, being sold worldwide, in many industries including consumer electronics, automotive, and aerospace.

About Sigasi

Sigasi is an early stage Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company that focuses on the creation of an Intelligent Development Environment (IDE) for Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) and offers digital circuit designers a new set of powerful features including assisted code completion, instant error correction support, and refactoring capabilities. Sigasi HDT contains an ultra-fast VHDL parser and compiler, that runs transparently in the background. This way, the productivity of hardware designers increases drastically, because the tool helps them to write, inspect and reuse their designs in an intuitive way. The company is headquartered in Ghent, Belgium. For further information, please visit http://www.sigasi.com.

About Baekeland Fund II

In 2005 the partners of the Ghent University Association, together with Fortis Private Equity Belgium, KBC Private Equity, Ethias, Volksvermogen and the ARKimedes Fund, established Baekeland Fund II. This fund was created with capital of 11.1 million EUR. Baekeland Fund II is building on the positive experience of the first Baekeland Fund. Baekeland Fund II wants to invest in some ten different, mainly high-tech companies that have grown out of research labs at Ghent University, Hogeschool Gent, Arteveldehogeschool or Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen. Baekeland Fund II is operationally managed UGent TechTransfer, assisted by investment managers from KBC Private Equity and Fortis Private Equity Belgium. For more info, see http://www.baekelandfonds.be.