alarm:clock

Semiconductors - Monday, October 31, 2005

Xambala - Profile

HQ: San Jose, CA

Founded: 2001

Management: Mike Knudsen is President and CEO. He was with QLogic's network storage group. Samba Murthy is Founder and COO. He was previously at XaQti, SEEQ, and BHEL.

Investors: In October 2005, the company raised $5.5M in Series B funding from return backers TeleSoft Partners, Mohr, Davidow Ventures and Jafco Ventures.

Business Model: Xambala has developed a new ASIC - what it calls the first semantic processor. The company joins a long line of semiconductor companies that look to put responsibilities onto chips functions that previously resided with software. Xambala targets processing of XML, Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Xambala's chip optimizes content processing for such applications as firewalls, email/spam filtering, and URL filtering.

Competitors: Xambala is the first - and maybe only - of its kind.

Dirt: We have seen plenty of other chip companies seeking to cash in on hot trends such as WiFi. Xambala is much more of a maverick. The company has raised funding from serious investors but the y have not ponied up a lot of money. We suspect that investors like the potential of Xambala but are not convinced that it will have a market until 2007 or later.