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Networking - Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Israel's Infiniband Leader Voltaire Files for IPO

We recently posted on Voltaire when Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures put $10M to work with an investment in Voltaire before its IPO. Benhamou, who once ran 3Com, became a Voltaire board member. This brings the total amount raised by the company to date to $64M. Investors include Pitango, Baker Capital and a host of others.

Today, Voltaire filed to raise up to $123.9M. The company said it will offer 5.8M shares, while selling shareholders will offer about 1.9M, at an expected price of between $12 - $14 per share. It has applied for listing on the Nasdaq under the symbol "VOLT."

Voltaire sells InfiniBand grid backbone solutions for networked computing, which cements it to IBM. Our suspicion is that Wall Street might not be thrilled about Voltaire no matter what its balance sheet shows, because the company has tied its horse to InfiniBand. What happens to Voltaire if InfiniBand uptake weakens. As Byte and Switch noted recently: "Recognizing any serious revenue from InfiniBand products would in itself be quite a feat. The high-speed, low-latency I/O interconnect was once hailed as a miracle cure for bottlenecks and other network ailments, but over the past year at least the technology has definitely lost steam."