August 10, 2007
Irish Intune Gets A $17.75M Optical Deal
Irish VC investment may down this year but it is not due to the lack of promising companies in the region, nor a lack of stock market stars in its recent tech past, as the Irish Independent illustrated in a recent feature story. You could also just ask the syndicate of London VCs that backed Dublin-based Intune Networks latest $17.75 round, namely Amadeus Capital Partners, Balderton Capital and Spark Capital. (via SiliconRepublic.com)
Or ask the partners at Atlantic Bridge, the venture fund that invested some $16.2M into GPS chipmaker Glonav, and who've been talking up its growth in the East Asian market, or ask the Canadian investors that took a stake in the fabless semiconductor upstart Redmere Technologies, one of the companies that this publication's reporter of the first hour, Valerie Thompson, has been following.
Founded in 1999 by John Dunne and Tom Farrell, Intune is an optical transceiver developer that recently recruited Tim Fritzley, a former Microsoft IPTV executive, as chief executive.
Intune is commercializing its laser tech by developing components that it says meet the requirements for IPTV service providers
If you are into optical components, then the buzzword is ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add Drop
Mulitplexors). As we read it, Intune has developed optical transceivers that support ROADM, which is what the telcos are using for the transport layer below Ethernet/IP for delivering IPTV and interactive services in their networks.
Balderton's George Coelho said in a Silicon Republic report on the deal: “The demands of the consumer have evolved significantly over the past decade and the requirement to deliver diverse, high-quality content in real-time is paramount to the success of the fixed-line telecoms industry. This presents an exciting opportunity for Intune. We are delighted to be involved with Intune and share their vision for the optical networking business.”
Early stage capital for Intune Networks was provided by Bank of Scotland (formerly ICC Ventures), Enterprise Ireland and angel investors including Chris McHugh and Leonard Donnelly.
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April 16, 2007
New Index For The Powerpoint Fatigued
New Index, a three year old Norwegian startup has raised an undisclosed amount from Proventure Seed, out of Norway too, according to Unquote. New Index has developed an optical pen and sensor set for beamers and projectors that enables users to write and record electronically what they draw on a a wall or whiteboard or even in the air.
The inventor is a former professor who got tired of static powerpoint and overhead projectors.
View New Index
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November 14, 2006
Biz Plan Competition With A $20M Result For Netronome
It looks like making a pitch at a MobileMonday event in London, hosted by 3i, paid off for Netronome Systems, a network processing board developer. It just raised a $20m Series C round led by 3i's venture capital unit, and added new investor, Tudor Investments.
Existing backers Top Technology Ventures, Spinner Global Technology Fund and a group of business angels including FORE Systems founders Robert Sansom and Eric Cooper, also participated in the round.
We rarely hear of companies getting a direct result from making their pitch at the various industry events, so when it happens we note it. 3i's spokeswoman told us that her firm's investment team first became involved with Netronome at a MobileMonday event it hosted earlier this year.
Netronome was founded in 2003. Its hardware can be used by network appliance vendors or by switch manufacturers developing network security gear, but also for application optimization (Netronome's tech analyzes content - deep packet inspection - and delivers it faster or slower depending on whether or not it is voice video data etc.) It supports network virtualization.
Read - 3i leads $20m funding of Netronome to accelerate virtualization vision with its Open Appliance Platform (press rel.)
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August 21, 2006
Nordic VCs Back Windows For Mobilephones Startup
Colochrome, a Finnish manufacturer of protective lenses, or windows, for mobilephones and hand-held devices, has raised a Series A financing round from Eqvitec and Creandum. The arrangement also includes debt financing from the OP Bank Group. The amount of capital raised was not disclosed.
The new funding will be used to ramp up manufacturing capacity of Colochrome's line of scratch resistant and display enhancing windows. The firm has been working since 2002 to create manufacturing process that is responsive and to a level demanded by high volume consumer electronics manufacturers. It will be ready to go online in early 2007.
"The market of protective lenses in mobile telecom handsets alone is estimated to grow to 2.5 billion units by 2010. Colochrome addresses this significant market need with a very promising new solution. Colochrome also shows that it is still possible to develop telecom manufacturing business from Scandinavia with new innovations and a global mindset from the start," says Jussi Hattula, Investment Director for Eqvitec Partners, advisor for Eqvitec Technology Fund III.Read - Colochrome Secures Financing for Global Market Entry (colochrome)
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August 14, 2006
Why Wintel And Dell Might Be Shopping Soon, And Where
Red Herring has a meaty report comparing the downsizing Wintel (Dell, Microsoft, Intel) juggernaut to companies that are growing in the current cycle, namely Texas Instruments, the chipmaker that sells to Danger for its smartphones and Nokia), Red Hat (Linux), and Apple (iMac).
It is a long article but worth reading for startups and corporate finance types to understand the pressures facing the giants, Wintel plus Dell, in the PC, Web TV, games console, and smartphone markets. And to get some ideas of where they might be prepared to pay good money for acquisitions
Red Herring says that not all business units at the Intel and Microsof are slowing in growth and that they've made some big bets on new areas to drive their next wave of growth - but overall sales growth is slowing, to the point that some institutional investors see their shares as "value" stocks, as opposed to growth stocks.
The End of Wintel?(red herring)
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July 19, 2006
Pelikon Eyes IPO After Two Rounds Of VC
Pelikon, a Welsh startup specialized in plastic displays, is putting the word out that it is heading for on an IPO within the next 18 months, according to local press reports. It actually first mentioned an IPO when it closed its second round last fall.
Pellikon, whose technology competes with OLED displays, a plastic electronics technology, has made been making some headway in getting its flexible, glowing, keypads into the appliance and consumer electronics markets, shipping some 1.5M units. It now has its eye on mobilephones, according to a report in IC Wales. 
Pelikon says its technolgy can challenge OLED and LCD, for example, as the small displays on the outside of a fliptop mobilephone. It can also be a backlight for super-flat keypads that flash when a call is coming in or highlight certain key for gaming applications, for example.
Founded in 2000, Pelikon has received two rounds of venture capital funding: £3m in 2000 and £5m in 2005. Both deals were led by Advent Venture Partners, which has been heading for the exit with several portfolio firms via the stock market in recent months.
Read - Pelikon Looks To Mobile (Ic wales)
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July 10, 2006
VCs Go Large On CoreOptics Latest Round
Optical networking hardware maker, CoreOptics Inc., has raised $28M from new and existing investors, bringing the company’s total funding to $68M since being founded in Nuremberg Germany in January 2001. That is a pretty large sized round of VC for a Europe optical component manufacturer. It must be hitting its milestones on target and on time.
Its backers include GIMV, Quest for Growth, Crescendo Ventures, TVM Capital, High Tech Private Equity, Atila Ventures and others.
Coreoptics' chips and subsystems are found inside optical networking gear for 10Gig and 40Gig connections.
Posted at 05:47 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 08, 2006
Nordic Startups On A Chilling Mission
We're noticing a stream of chip and processor cooling innovators coming out of Scandinavia, bent on making computers and home electronics quieter. Did we miss a conference in Skane where everyone agreed that this is the next big thing?
No matter. 
The latest to enter the fray is Nanofreeze Technologies, a spin off from Lund University. It joins Noise Limit and Asetek, both out of Denmark.
Below the jump we compare and contrast the competition and give it all some context.
Asetek sells units that can be installed on the mother board, while Noise Limit is hoping to get its liquid-cooling units sold as part of the basic CPU spec for new gear.
Asetek's can be installed after sale. It's also a bulkier solution, but it recently raised capital from a syndicate of investors to shrink its heat pumps.
Noise Limit has partnered itself with a major cooling systems manufacturing partner to be able to handle the high volume demand that it hopes its compact and cool products (pictured here) will generate from users of Intel and AMD processors.
Driving chip cooling efforts is the desire to dissipate the heat generated by today's digital video recorders, PCs, and home media centers -- it's a waste of energy and prevents processors from peak performance -- without adding more noise to the equation. The fan is the culprit here.
Basically, too much heat and noise restrict where you place the electronic gear.
Read - The Need For Silence (noise limit)
Read - Asetek Raises VC (a:c euro)
Read - Nanofreeze in the fridge (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 19, 2006
Personal Beamer From Cambridge
University spinoff, Light Blue Optics, in Cambridge, England, has reached the demo stage of its match-box sized personal beamer. It's only black&white for the time being. But the plan is to develop the tech so that a mobilephone, laptop computer, personal media players such as the video iPod™, and digital cameras can be used to project videos, photos, or clips forviewing on a larger display area.
The startup raised seed funding from angel investors in 2005.
There are a few teams in Europe that are working on similar components for small-sized projectors, such as Upstream Engineering in Sweden (image below of non-working models), which raised a seed round from Holtron Ventures over a year ago. Holtron is the same firm that backed MySQL in its early days. And there's an R&D team at the Fraunhofer Institute that have demonstrated a cigarette-pack sized projector.
But the progress in commercialization seems to be slow.
Posted at 09:26 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 26, 2006
Cameraphone Lens Innovator Brings In Third Round
France's Iris Capital has led a €16.4 million ($20M) third round for Lyon-based Varioptic, a developer and manufacturer of a new kind of lens for cameras and cameraphones.
Align image right with flowing text
The firm has been executing on its milestones, according to is steady flow of press release, and this round confirms that. It brings the total amount raised to about €28M, plus an undisclosed amount from Japan's NIFVentures. Its seed stage investor is Paris-based Sofinnova Partners
This is the second cameraphone lens deal this month. (See link to Eyesquad funding below.)
Founded in 2003, Varioptic has developed a liquid lens technology that reduces the number of moving parts, doing all the things that conventional lenses can do but consuming less power, being more robust, and lighter. Target market is cameraphones, but the tech can be used in other types of devices too, says the firm.
Varioptic has yet to sign a volume design-in win but claims more than 100 pilot projects with lens module manufacturers and mobilephone-makers.
The last time we talked to Varioptic, the firm was telling us about its sound IP and patent portfolio. That is because there had been some reports in the trade press about a dispute with Philips, which also has a lens with similar technology. We're trying to find out if it has been resolved.
Read - Varioptic Secures (press release)
Read - Eyesquad funding (a:c euro)
Posted at 06:12 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 24, 2006
Startup Brings Robocops To Market
Berlin-based Robowatch is marketing a security robot that looks a bit like a rolling Thermos with a cherry on top, but its simple look belies the extra support that it can provide human security guards.
The indoor model (pictured right), the first that the firm brought to market, comes equipped with heat sensors, handy for detecting warm bodies when the lights go out, plus 23 other sensors (smoke, gas, movement, etc), wireless communications, video camera, optical scanner, alarms, and loudspeaker - it can demand to "see" identification in a couple of dozen languages.
The startup just won a deal with Diehl, to make a more robust model for reconaissance and situations where humans might not want to go, such as a suspected bomb location. Robowatch also is developing a desktop version for super paranoid consumers.
All its robots are designed to be mass-produced. They are modular too, so that means customers can modify based on their requirements.
Is that a robot you're carrying, or your hand-luggage?
The indoor robot costs between €500 and €1500 a month to rent, weighs 25 kg, is 116cm high (almost 4 ft). Robowatch also sells some software for communicating and managing the sensor-equipped robots.
Founded in 2000, Robowatch is based in Berlin and is backed by High Tech Private Equity (last round was in July 2003). The founders are Ulf Stremmel, an engineer with sales and marketing experience in the security sector, and Jens Hanke who heads up R&D. He's a mathematician and bio-informatics specialist. The company employs 25.
We think the firm will win sales based on the novelty factor initially, the big question is will the roster of value added reseller partners, and the Diehl deal, result in the high volume sales the firm's founders are aiming for.
Read - Robowatch and Diehl Launch (press release)
Posted at 07:09 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 05, 2006
Big Deals Fast Track PacketFront's Sales
Sweden's Packetfront has been on our radar since it raised its last round of finance, back in June 2004, so we take note when we see it ramping up sales. It is benefitting from the triple play broadband rollouts underway in Northern Europe and has just sold a $5M initial contract to a Swedish provider, on top of selling €23M worth of gear to a Danish broadband provider, enabling the firm to exceed last year's total annual sales figure in its first quarter 2006.
The unassuming PacketFront broadband box for the home
Packetfront, founded in 1999, expects to generate sales of €43M this year. Its currently hiring for a US expansion.
The fiber broadband firm lays claim to a competitively priced product line that covers gear for the home, as well as software and hardware for the network provider.
It's investors include Amadeus Capital and TLCom, both UK funds.
A Packetfront router supports TV over xDSL, while being able to aggregate networks running WiFi, WiMax, Ethernet over Coax, and Broadband over power lines, for operators that running mixed broadband rollouts.
GigaOm has a good post on the revival of interest in fiber broadband players this week with a US perspective.
Read -SWEDEN.SE - Capital sows the seeds of rapid growth
Read- Good Times Almost Back (gigaom)
Posted at 09:21 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 24, 2006
France's Netcentrex Mulls IPO
With jobs open in marketing, biz dev, R&D, and sales, France’s Netcentrex, a supplier of xDSL and broadband gear, is obviously growing along with the demand for VOIP services, and today there’s news of an upcoming IPO.
Netcentrix co-founder and CTO Olivier Hersent has kept a key role at company despite several rounds of finance and acquisitions
Les Echos reports today that an IPO is in the works for the equipment vendor, whose sales in 2005 were €40M up from €26M in 2004, the year that it became profitable. Its chief executive told the French paper that sales of €60M are expected this year. There is no word on the bankers mandated for the transaction, a date, or the probable size.
The startup raised $34M from VCs including CDC Innovation Partners, Crescendo Ventures, Innovacom, and Newbury Ventures, among others. Founded in 1998, Netcentrex lays claim to providing its gear for over 2 million VoIP lines in commercial service.
It could be a sizable floatation. Les Echos reminds us that Netcentrex’s closest rival, Cirpack was acquired by Thomson, one of Europe’s largest technology companies, for an estimated €94M last year. According to the alarm:clock euro's notes, the year before it was acquired profitable Cirpack had sales of €15M.
Posted at 10:07 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 23, 2006
VCs Back Bulking Up of Napatech's Product Line
Copenhagen-based Napatech, a developer Ethernet adapter cards, said it raised $5M to acquire network adapter technologies from Xyratex, a firm that spun out of IBM back in 1994, now traded on the NASDAQ.
Napatech sells 1gig and 10gig Ethernet adapter cards that boost the networking performance of computer applications running data and processing intensive applications.
Several members of the management team and one of its backers are ex-Cisco executives.
OEMs are the target market for Napatech's gear
In 2004, Naptech raised €2.1M from Northzone Ventures and prior to that it had a seed round when it was founded in 2003 of less than €1M from private investors.
Read - Napatech Acquires Programmable Network Adapter Business and IP From Xyratex
Read - Napatech Receives $5 million Venture Capital
Posted at 03:59 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 22, 2006
Asetek gets more cash to chill hot chips
Asetek, a Danish manufacturer of chip cooling systems, said today that it topped up its recently announced €4M venture round with an additional €2M in capital from KT Venture Group.
Asetek makes heat pipes or chip cooling systems. It is known among the Red Bull-slugging PC gamers and developers that use its high-end (read high-priced) bulkier products to prevent their overclocked central processing unit (CPU) from burning out.
The coffee mug-sized VapoChill unit on a motherboard.
But it now has a mass market product, the size of a coffee mug and the firm claims sales of a few thousand units a month via its Internet site.
The VCs invested because they believe that Asetek can keep shrinking the units so that vendors of silent, small form factor and home theater PCs will adopt the technology.
Like the name says, Hush Technologies, makes quite computer gear for the living room.
Competitors are also racing to reduce size, such as Zalman. And PC makers, such as Germany's Hush Technologies are also incorporating innovative heat sink technology.
KT Venture invests for KLA-Tencor, a major semiconductor equipment supplier. It said in statement that its knowledge of the industry indicates that there is a shift when it comes to cooling CPUs and that Asetek has "the cost-effective solution to this need".
In other words, the heat that chips produce is not being dealt with by the chip manufacturers and traditional fan/sink units cannot handle the thermal load (plus they’re noisy) therefore a plug in or add on device like Aseteks has a nice-sized opportunity.
Read - Asetek KT Venture Announcement (press release)
Posted at 01:07 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 14, 2006
Video bloggers drive demand for storage
The boom in video blogging or vlogging might not be making the producers of the content a fortune yet. But we think that storage hardware vendors must be pretty happy about the trend.
In Europe, companies like France's LaCie are benefitting.
The LaCie Bigger Extreme sounds ike a hamburger but it is a 1.2TB storage device with highspeed Firewire and a USB port
We don't need market research firms to tell us that, we can just look around. For example, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schultz, who is an avid video blogger and on our Blogroll, posts that he has acquired his second 1.2 TB disk in 3 months.
It is a LaCie box, a brand that is gaining in the small office/home office market, according to the firm's GM, Pierre van der Elst. He noted in the firm’s recent financial results: “We gained market shares in the retail channel, and our business model is taking this fact into account.”
The rise of demand in the retail market for hard drives makes sense with the growing use of digital media in the home. Your a:c euro reporter even has a couple of LaCie's external hard drives. Acquired not because they look good, but because the gear is priced right.
The French company, founded in 1989, is growing quickly and it has good margins for a hardware company. One of its strengths is industrial design. It wins a lot of such awards. We’re not the only ones that think it's interesting, Red Herring has identified it as “small cap computing” stock to watch.
The Skwarim portable hard drive in hot pink with a soft touch cover from LaCie.
Its had 8 quarters of consecutive growth and last year annual sales climbed to €289M, up 27 percent over the previous year. Net income was €23.5 million, representing 8 percent of sales, compared to 6 percent the previous year. Its market cap is currently €419M.
A stackable 80Gbyte portable hard drive that comes in red, white, and blue.
The main reason LaCie is on our radar is that Remote Reward has it in its portfolio. Established in 2000 by a French tech entrepreneur-turned-investor, Andre Jolivet (founded Wavecom), Remote does early stage venture deals, as well as longer term investments in publicly-traded firms, along a theme.
The theme is Jolivet's vision of how convergence is going to roll out. For example, he's big on wireless LAN (WiFi).
Remote says it made a 2000 percent return on its investment in LaCie over the years that it held the stock. It sold a large stake last year, and still has a small stake left. We've been trying to interview Jolivet to hear his thoughts on what's hot and what's not but he doesn't like to see himself in press, we're told.
Read - Remote Reward (website)
Read - The Internet TV Broadcasting Biz Is For Real (alarm:clock)
Posted at 04:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
March 08, 2006
The locate-me jacket and the camcorder backpack
The Auto Salon is on in Geneva and in Hannover the massive CEBIT electronics exhibition is underway, as a result the PR machines are running full throttle, and filling our inbox.
But an announcement from German startup Interactive Wear stood out. We remember when it spun out of Infineon last June via a management buyout.
Interactive Wear is showing the O’Neill h.3 series
The ONeill h.3 is an "upgraded communication and entertainment backpack" with a water-resistant storage space for a camcorder, as well as "a flexibly mountable miniature camera for connection to the video camera", which can be installed on a helmet. It is targeted at “sport freaks” that want to film their own kite surfing adventures, dangerous free-climbing tours, or 360 acrobatics in a snowboard halfpipe.
Like concept cars, CEBIT has its share of concept gear, or in this case concept clothing.
German startup's Know Where Jacket(Photo: GPSoverIP)
It used to be automobiles that we would describe being fully loaded with a GPS location pinpointing system, mobilephone, an mp3 player, headphones, a microphone and an emergency call button, now it’s a jacket.
Antennas, wiring, and chips are all integrated in the clothing and backpack.
Read- Interactive Wear Press Kit
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March 07, 2006
Sweden’s Telelogic AB acquires VC-backed I-Logix
Swedish embedded systems developer Telelogic is paying $80 million in cash to acquire I-Logix, a US based company that provides an additional technology product for Telelogic’s embedded systems business. The price paid is about 26 times last year’s profit of $3M. In the same year I-Logix sales grew by 30 percent and sales reached $30M, the a:c euro confirmed with Telelogic this morning.
According to press information on I-Logix website, the firm had several investors including Phillips Ventures BV, Needham Capital Partners, ABS Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Gilde Investments, One Liberty Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners.
Posted at 07:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
February 03, 2006
Broadbus makes solid-state VOD strides
Last week we wrote about Swedish video-on-demand server startup Edgeware comparing its stage of development to Broadbus, concluding that the Nordic startup was set to give the more established and better funded US-based video on demand server manufacturer a run for its money. It turns out Broadbus is a lot further ahead than we thought, well beyond the prototype phase as suggested in the post.
This is not a new Sub-Zero fridge. Its the Broadbus' B-1 and it's coming to Europe.
Broadbus began shipping the B-1 Video server (the unit with DRAM storage) in the second quarter of 2004, according to Jim Owens, director of marketing and communications for the Boxborough-based firm. "Since then we’ve had more than 60 revenue-generating (real, live) deployments worldwide," he writes. The news, directly from Broadbus, makes clear it has a lead with solid state-based VOD servers. It also makes clear that the uptake of VOD by telecommunications operators and broadcasters is real this time.
We remember the VOD hype in the nineties. Back then it received probably 1000 times more analyst and press coverage, with zero corresponding commercial deployments.
Read- Edgeware versus Broadbus
Posted at 04:32 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 31, 2006
Startups like logo on laptop ads
Over at CNET there is a story about the popularity of colorful laptop covers and vinyl “skins” that enable users to boldly brandish their name and logo, instead of Sony's or Dell's.
The skins are popular with European startups running low-budget market campaigns, it seems.
Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, is promoting his latest startup, vpod.tv whenever he flips open his laptop.
As does someone from Martin Varsavsky’s latest startup, FON, an alternative telco.
They turn to Aspoke.com, an Ireland-based vendor of laptop covers. It was launched by Antoin O Lachtnain, an IT and telecoms consultant whose company is called Digital Messenger. It is not high-tech and there is lots of competition in the customize-my-gadget market, but Aspoke is interesting because of its customers.
Read - Yearning for color on laptops
Posted at 08:06 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 26, 2006
Edgeware versus Broadbus
versus 
Boxborough, Mass-based Broadbus has a new rival in the form of Stockholm-based Edgeware AB, a developer of video servers for broadband networks, which has just raised 25 million SEK ($ 3 mln) from Swedish early stage investor Creandum.
Both are developing video servers to deliver video-on-demand over cable and telephone networks to broadband Internet subscribers. Their main point of differentiation is the storage technology used. All video servers contain some kind of storage, either a hard drive or solid state memory chips.
These two both use memory chips. Edgeware uses NAND (Flash) and Broadbus uses DRAM. According Joachim Roos, CEO and co-founder of Edgeware, NAND is cheaper and the price “erosion” is faster than DRAM, which means his costs are lower.
Broadbus was founded in 1999 and has raised about 20 times more capital. It has a prototype and is apparently running trials with telcos and cable TV operators.
Edgeware was founded in 2004, was bootstrapped until now, and is about 8 months away from running trials with telcos and cableTV operators.
The three founders of Edgeware hail from Xelerated (Roos was a co-founder and still has shares in the company), a metro Ethernet networking equipment maker, which received a large round of VC from Accel and Amadeus last year. This is the third venture the three have worked together on. Roos says they are not rich yet.
So we are thinking these hungry Swedish entrepreneurs with their fortunes yet to made, who have worked with telcos before and know about the long sales cycles and grueling trials, and who have demonstrated that they are capital efficient, just might give Broadbus a run for its money.
