Data center chip startup Fungible, founded by Juniper Networks and Apple executives, closed a $200 million Series C financing round that it plans to use to accelerate product development. The company is developing a new type of silicon it calls a data processing unit (DPU) for data-centric computing.

SoftBank Vision Fund led the round, which also included participation from Norwest Venture Partners and existing investors. To date, Fungible has raised more than $300 million in capital from venture capitalists and investors including Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Redline Capital, and Walden Riverwood Ventures.

“We are very excited to be part of the SoftBank and NVP portfolio of companies, which are great partners with a solid and long game plan,” said Fungible CEO Pradeep Sindhu in an an email to SDxCentral. “The funding amount cements the need for a truly innovative product, which can address the insatiable data demands in the data center.”

Fungible got its start in 2015. It was founded by Bertrand Serlet and Sindhu, who previously founded Juniper and held roles as CEO and CTO. Sindhu stepped down as CTO in 2017 to focus on Fungible, but he remains chief scientist at Juniper. Prior to Fungible, Serlet founded a storage startup called Upthere, which was acquired by Western Digital, and before that was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple.

The company hasn’t yet released its chip, but says its DPU is a new type of programmable processor that is complementary to existing processors like CPUs. DPUs will “enable an order of magnitude improvement in the execution of data-centric workloads,” and can be deployed in data centers at all scales and locations, Fungible claims.

With the new capital “we will be laser focused on accelerating our product development and customer acquisition efforts,” Sindhu said.