Led by Granite Global Ventures, Ageia Technologies Inc., raised $17 million in Series C round of financing. Formed in 2002 by Manju Hegde, Ageia is a maker of hardware-accelerated physics for games called ‘PhysX SDK’ that provides gamers with a greater depth of physical interactivity than software-only physics.

This round of funding brings in new investor Hercules Technology Growth Capital along with current investors Apex Venture Partners, BA Venture Partners, CID Ventures, HIG Ventures, and VentureTech Alliance.

The capital raised will be used to bring the AGEIA flagship PhysX processor to the hard-core gaming market and meet growing market demands for the company’s AGEIA PhysX SDK.

“The gaming community is very large, and the PhysX SDK and processor are taking full advantage of parallel computing architectures to process computationally intensive physics tasks. By providing a new product category in this large consumer space, the Physics Processing Unit will breathe new life into the PC gaming space, says Hegde on VC interest in his company based in Mountain View, CA.

Speaking about the market for his products he says, the game enthusiasts, developers and PC technology aficionados have embraced this technology and are anticipating its arrival.
With over $4 billion as the graphics market size, Hegde says in steady state, the physics processor should be able to find an application in every PC.

About competition, he says right now, the AGEIA PhysX processor is the first of its kind.