Three months after Okika Devices moved its headquarters to Colorado Springs, it has caught the attention and $2 million from a local aerospace and defense venture capital fund.

Specializing in field programmable analog arrays, software and manufacturing computer chips, Okika Devices relocated to Colorado Springs in late May. The company was previously based in California and chose Colorado Springs over the The Golden State and Arizona.

The investment from the Colorado ONE Fund will serve as a catalyst for Okika Devices to expand sales and further product development, Okika CEO William Staunton said. As part of its move to Colorado, Okika planned to add 20 jobs, to complement its six existing employees.

“Right now we are in buildup mode,” he said. “The investment from the Colorado ONE Fund will kick-start the launch of our marketing and sales (division). … We are focusing on sales now and then pivoting to further product development.”

Okika has hired at least one intern from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and an engineer. It is looking to add one more analog engineer to its local team, Staunton said.

“Analog” might conjure images of clunky, inefficient, building-sized computers or the cables needed to connect a VCR to a TV. Modern analog devices, like those built and sold by Okika Devices, flip the script, and are far smaller, lighter, easier to power and cheaper for customers, Staunton said.

While digital circuits dominate the electronics landscape for consumers, there are energy inefficiencies baked in that make them impractical for certain applications, he said.

A digital circuit must first convert an analog signal — vision, sounds and textures — to a digital one before it can do anything with the data. Data must then be converted back to an analog output so the user can understand it.

This requires a significant amount of power, many parts and introduces delays in processing output, Staunton added. An analog circuit bypasses this, dropping the need for two levels of translation.

Analog computers propelled humanity to the stars before falling out of favor for digital designs. But now, what is old is new again, and analog computing is “the future of intelligent electronics,” Staunton said in a news release.

An analog array made by Okika can be reconfigured on the fly, which can enable rapid and efficient fixes to devices like satellites on orbit, Staunton said. The analog array can be connected to several sensors, check if operations are correct and if not it can “tell the system how to fix itself,” he said.

Analog arrays consume less power than a digital array, as well. In one application, an analog array was found to be 1,000 times more energy efficient than its digital counterpart. And Okika’s devices have seen gains in energy efficiency, with one device being 32 times more efficient than a previous generation of analog arrays.

These advances caught the eye of the Colorado ONE Fund, which announced Thursday it had invested $2 million in the company.

The Colorado ONE Fund, formed by Colorado Springs businessman Kevin O’Neil through his O’Neil Group, invests in promising aerospace and defense companies. This year, it invested $1 million into CisLunar Industries, a Loveland-based company that likens its power processing units to Nvidia’s graphics processors.

The Colorado ONE fund began in 2023 and partnered with the Colorado Venture Capital Authority to create a $34 million financial arsenal with the express goal of propping up Colorado’s aerospace and defense industry. The state has one of the largest aerospace economies in the nation, despite having no launch facilities.

With Okika Devices, the Colorado ONE Fund sees a company meeting its mission of strengthening national security and the nation’s technological edge, O’Neil said in the release. It offers a unique capability that can be used across the defense and industrial sectors, he said.

“Okika’s breakthrough work in analog integrated circuits is exactly the kind of critical capability we need to support,” he said.