It’s been almost two years since we first saw Smooth-Stone pitch their business at the Rice Alliance venture forum. The company has been making steady progress, culminating in a huge round of financing. The company announced it is raising $48 million from a unique syndicate of investors comprising industry leading venture capital firms and semiconductor innovators. That syndicate includes a pretty substantial group including the government of Abu Dhabi (via ATIC), traditional venture capital (Battery, Flybridge, and Highland Capital), and industry (Texas Instruments).

“This kind of investment, the amount, and the strength of this syndicate is a strong endorsement for the innovation we are bringing to market,” said Smooth-Stone CEO Barry Evans. “We look forward to taking advantage of the insights and know-how of these industry-leading investors.”

Power consumption matters more than ever. Smooth-Stone will bring the low-power virtues of mobile phone technology to servers and data centers. Its semiconductors and software will provide a solution for companies where energy consumption by servers has become a constraining and expensive issue by increasing the density of computer resources while significantly conserving energy, cooling and space in the data center. Smooth-Stone customers will have new, unseen options as they plan their future server deployments.

“Our goal is to completely remove power consumption as an issue for the data center. Imagine that change for companies with a large presence on the Internet,” added Evans. “They all deal with the reality that as the mass of information grows daily, so does their power consumption. Every day these companies are thinking about managing their data center sprawl. We want to make sure that space and power are not constraining their potential.”

Semiconductor investment has traditionally required a unique skill set and discipline, the importance of which has only been amplified by the recessed economy. The Smooth-Stone investor syndicate offers a strong collection of previous successes in the semiconductor industry including companies such as Advanced Analogic, Cimaron, Ikanos, MaxLinear, PA Semi, Sigmatel and SiTera and will actively support the company in its mission to redefine the server market and data center performance.