ARM-based MCU maker closes $25M venture funding round

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 8/22/2007

Luminary Micro Inc., an Austin, Texas-based startup that designs and sells ARM Cortex-M3-based  microcontrollers, today announced that it closed its series C funding round for $25 million.

New investor Adams Street Partners joined existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), EXA Ventures, and ATA Ventures in this round. Tom Berman, a partner with Adams Street Partners, has joined Luminary Micro's board.

The company, which launched its ARM MCU at a starting price of $1 in 2006, said it would use the funding to further the marketing of its Stellaris family of MCUs and related products. "With over 50 32-bit Stellaris microcontrollers in production today and with customer adoption booming, this capital will ensure that the company can continue expansion of its efforts on all fronts," Luminary's CEO Jim Reinhart said in a statement.

"The cost of developing embedded software has skyrocketed over the past decade, and the profusion of incompatible, proprietary MCUs has only compounded the problem," Luminary Chairman and NEA venture partner Jimmy Treybig added in the statement.  "The time for standardization is right now, and Luminary Micro's combination of the ARM Cortex-M3 core with market-specific Stellaris peripheral solutions provides companies developing embedded systems with a dramatic competitive and economic advantage. Proprietary MCUs are a millstone around the neck of the embedded industry's innovation."