Wisair Secures $20M in Funding

Online staff -- Electronic News, 1/24/2006

Tel Aviv, Israel-based Wisair, a founding member of the WiMedia Alliance, struck gold today with its announcement of a sizable $20 million funding push.

This C-round of funding was led by Apax Partners, with participation from existing investors Bynet, Intel Capital, RAD Group’s founders, Vertex, new investor Tomen Electronics and other investors.
 
“Wisair is at an exciting juncture in its growth as it has already created significant penetration in the market, with more than 80 customers adopting our development systems and reference designs that are based on our industry-proven chipsets,” said David Yaish, Wisair president and CEO, in a statement. “Today, these partners are just beginning to incorporate our offerings into a broad breadth of consumer products. With the new funds, we can continue to focus on expanding our sales channels and move to production shipment of our chipsets.”
 
This funding presents a boon for Wisair, as well as the MultiBand Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing ultra wideband (MOFDM-UWB) supported WiMedia Alliance to help expedite the development of their UWB chipsets. Now in direct competition with opposing camp direct sequence-UWB backer UWB Forum, both groups recently agreed to halt action toward a consensual IEEE UWB standard.
 
 “The WiMedia-based UWB and Wireless USB market made significant progress during the past year. We expect 2006 to continue this trend as WiMedia-based offerings are beginning to be incorporated into a number of PC and consumer-based products. In fact, we expect to see a compound annual growth rate of nearly 200 percent between 2006 and 2009,” said Brian O’Rourke, senior analyst with InStat, in a statement. “Wisair, with its latest round of funding, is poised to be among the market leaders and start commercializing its solutions in this hot-growth-market sector.”
 
Today’s funding announcement comes on the heels of Wisair’s participation at the Consumer Electronics Show, where it showcased its Wireless USB Hub reference design and its high performance 480 Mbps operation, as well as its various Wireless USB implementations with 13 companies including D-Link, Intellon, Seagate and Toshiba.