WisBusiness: The Podcast with Karu Sankaralingam, Simple Machines Inc.

Karu Sankaralingham

This week’s “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Karu Sankaralingam, founder of Simple Machines Inc.

Sankaralingam, who is also a professor of computer sciences at UW-Madison, set out in 2017 to design a streamlined computer chip. Today, Simple Machines is in the process of bringing it to market.

The chip can handle massive amounts of big data in different ways that results in computing performance of up to 40 times faster than currently available chips handling the same kind of data. 

“We are bringing it to market in two ways,” Sankaralingam explained. “We sell those systems to big companies like Target, Walmart, financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and so on who have big data center deployments.”  

“Another way is we bring it to market like it’s just a piece of software,” he said. Simple Machines has its own data center where customers use the software by running a piece of code that sends a request to the Simple Machines server.

The chip functions as both a piece of hardware and software, which is the key differentiation for Simple Machines. The inspiration for this technology was to find a fast working device that could keep up with the ever changing algorithms and software — even those that haven’t been developed yet.

Simple Machines’ chip is currently sampling with early customers. 

“We are eagerly looking to expand those trials and we actually kicked off a second-generation design as well,” Sankaralingam said.

Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison: