Ukrainian company Polyteda Cloud has attracted €1.2 million in funding from Horizon 2020, the EU’s biggest research and innovation program, which has nearly 80 billion euros of funding available over seven years until 2020.
Polyteda will use the funding to roll the product onto the European market and promote itself on it.
“These are European investments we’ve won in a decent, competitive battle,” Polyteda CEO Alexander Grudanov told the Kyiv Post.
More than 1,200 companies worldwide have applied for funding under the program.
“We understand how much responsibility we have, being the first company from Ukraine to get this funding,” Grudanov said. “We can’t let down either ourselves or Ukraine in general.”
Polyteda Cloud is a spinoff project of Polyteda Ukraine, a company that is itself part of the high-tech holding KM Core. The purpose of the company’s software is to check the designs of microchips for mistakes before they go for manufacture at semiconductor factories.
“The price of a mistake is high here,” Grudanov said. “This is the most responsible and expensive stage. One mistake could be the reason to call back a whole batch of microchips.”
According to Grudanov, a simple oversight might cause losses worth many millions, or even billions, to a chip maker, and ruin its reputation.
“It’s bad when (mistakes) come out in the post-production phase,” Grudanov said. “How many billions has (electronics producer) Samsung lost?” he added, referring to the scandal facing South Korean cellphone maker Samsung, which abandoned production of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones after there were multiple cases of the devices catching fire.
“The battery problems might have been connected with its power control system, which is basically a microchip,” Grudanov said. “It could have had a design mistake that hadn’t been noticed.”
Read the full interview with Mr. Grudanov in the Kyiv Post.
