Digital home network chip developer Ubicom Inc. has gone back to the well one last time, raising $18 million in what is labeled a fourth
round, and completing an odyssey that has encompassed at least eight rounds of funding and well over $100 million in venture investment from financial and strategic investors.
The latest round appears to be unvarnished good news for the 12-year-old company originally known as Scenix Semiconductor Inc., as it prepares to put the Lehman Brothers Venture Partners- and Samsung Venture Investment Corp.-led round to work in solidifying a lead in the fast-growing digital picture frame market. The company already holds a strong position in the home router market, with chips powering products for the home made by market leaders Netgear Inc., D-Link Systems Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. subsidiary LinkSys. But Unbicom opted to sink additional money into taking a bigger share of the market for emerging digital home products.
Ubicom's communications processors were recently selected by D-Link to run its new digital picture frame products, and the company expects to announce additional design wins for DPF products, which allow users to send photos or streaming data to small display screens connected to home networks. The company also believes there will be additional adjacent markets it can move into to capitalize on flexible chip technology and software development. Ubicom chief financial officer Ty Truong says that previous investors Investcorp Technology Ventures, August Capital, Levensohn Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and JatoTech Ventures were more than willing to cough up additional investment to widen opportunities.
- Clifford Carlsen
See Feb. 19 press release from UbicomFor more see
Techshowwire.com and
GigaOM
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