A virtually unheard-of Israeli startup, Lucid Information Technology Ltd., has received financial backing in their second round of funding from Intel Capital, Giza Venture Capital and Genesis Partners. The company raised a total of $12 million, $7.5 million more compared to the $4.5 million of their first round which was held in 2005.

Lucid Information Technology Ltd. was launched in 2003 with $500,000 in funding provided by Israeli business incubator Mayaan Technology Ventures. The company currently employs 27 workers and is located in Kfar Netter, Israel. Their initial product will be a high-performance System on a Chip (SoC) and parallel architecture that will be able to support four graphics processing units (GPUs) simultaneously. Lucid believes that their product will transform “traditional off-the-shelve graphic cards, graphic processor units (GPU) and graphic cores into powerful and scalable visualization solution, transparently to the applications, enabling price-performance ratios never considered possible before.”

Lucid’s parallel-processing chip will allow several graphics processors to work in parallel and is highly targeted at computer gaming. Lucid hardware and software will be both required in order to make the complete system work.

Lucid expects for their first complete samples to be ready by the end of 2007. The company hopes to gain the support of board manufacturers such as Asus or Gigabyte and system integrators such as Dell, HP, and Alienware.