Venture Capital News
Military Nanotech Spending Proves Difficult to Tap
With threats to the U.S. increasingly coming from terrorist organizations, rogue nations, and insurgencies, the military is driving a major effort to improve its capabilities – making it one of the best prospective buyers for applications of nanotechnology. But companies large and small that supply these nanotech solutions are failing to exploit the military market effectively because of mismatched development strategies, according to a new report from Lux Research entitled "Setting Supplier Strategies for Military Nanotech Applications."
"Despite military and defense buyers’ deep pockets, diverse needs, and risk-friendly profile, many perils make selling to these clients tough going," said Lux Research Senior Analyst Mark Bünger, author of the report. "When we examined the fate of suppliers that applied for the 809 small business grants from the Department of Defense, we found that long lead times, IP issues, and an inability to scale up make success hard to achieve."
To assess military nanotech opportunities for commercial organizations, Lux Research identified 809 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants totaling $195 million that were issued by the Department of Defense for nanotechnology applications. The grants were categorized in seven application domains: propellants and explosives, biomedical, sensors, electronics, power, structural materials and surfaces, and coatings and filters. In addition, Lux Research constructed an evaluation tool to assess 46 applications across the seven domains on price/performance, military priority, and commercial potential.
Among the report’s highlights:
- Nanotech applications in electronics, power, surfaces, coatings, and filters are good candidates for military and commercial co-development. They both meet high-priority military challenges and address large, near-term commercial markets.
- Biomedical applications have stronger commercial opportunities then military ones, though military demand in many cases offer support for early-stage development.
- Sensor and structural materials applications are unlikely to break out of a military niche – because military buyers value their performance enhancements enough to support higher costs, where most commercial entities do not.
- Propellants and explosives applications fall by the wayside, lacking major commercial interest and ranking relatively low on military priority.
Suppliers of nanotechnology-driven solutions will need new approaches to make the military and defense market work for them. "Today, small suppliers seek SBIR grants for narrowly-defined components of larger systems that the military needs, and small and large suppliers both turn to systems integrators to incorporate their inventions into complete solutions," said Bünger. "Suppliers should recognize the inherent risks in both paths and take appropriate steps to mitigate them – by focusing on commercial co-development early and avoiding over-reliance on military sources of revenue."
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mBlox Raises $25 Million To Accelerate Global Growth Plans
Representatives of mBlox Inc. announced it has raised US$25 million to accelerate its new product roll-out and extend its global footprint. The equity investment was led by new investor Trident Capital, a $1.5 billion Silicon Valley Venture Capital Fund, and supported by existing mBlox investors including BA Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Novus Ventures and Avanti Capital Ltd.
mBlox provides message delivery and mobile billing services to businesses worldwide. Among the only companies to focus exclusively on providing a global mobile transaction network, mBlox has secured leadership in major markets including the United States and Europe, processing over 1bn mobile business transactions worth approximately $400M in 2005.
mBlox plans to use the funds for acquisitions in Europe and Asia, infrastructure advancements, and global expansion of mBlox's mobile transaction network services. The Company will continue to focus on the transmission, clearing and settlement of transactions on mobile phones worldwide, and abstain from engaging in the provision or promotion of content.
During 2005, mBlox extended its direct billing reach to 15 countries, launching new services in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland and Germany, and now has billing capabilities reaching over 400m mobile subscribers worldwide. mBlox also continued to work in close collaboration with the mobile operators to ensure an orderly and secure development of the premium-billed SMS market. In February 2005, mBlox announced a worldwide partnership with MasterCard to support its fraud alerting system, and the Company has seen strong growth in the financial services, transport information, enterprise messaging and entertainment alerts sectors. During the year mBlox also supported a number of worldwide fund-raising charity text appeals.
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Mauj Telecom Receives $10 Million in VC Funding
Indian wireless solutions provider Mauj Telecom has received US$10 million in venture funding from WestBridge Capital Partners, Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital.
Focusing on mobile music, gaming, mobile commerce and mobile messaging, Mauj develops services on all leading platforms including J2ME, Smartphone, BREW, Symbian, SS7 and I-Mode. It partners with leading wireless operators and portals worldwide.
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MeeVee Closes $6.5 Million Funding Round Led by Labrador Ventures
MeeVee, the premier developer of personalized video entertainment search and discovery experiences for consumers on the Internet, today announced the closing of a $6.5 million Series B round of funding. Labrador Ventures led the round with additional investments from WaldenVC, Edmond de Rothschild Venture Capital Management and DEFTA Partners. The funding will be used to support engineering, marketing and business development efforts to address the soaring demand for MeeVee’s syndicated, and direct-to-consumer, personalized TV and video search service.
Developed to help consumers search for, find, manage and share programming content of interest, MeeVee’s advanced TV and video search and discovery experience works across multiple platforms. The company also offers a syndication program that enables third-party Web sites such as newspaper portals, cable operators and other content providers to offer the power of MeeVee to their site visitors. In addition, MeeVee was recently awarded two technology patents that enable the company to provide the most accurate and relevant programming search results in the marketplace today.
In addition to McVee President Michael Raneri, MeeVee board members include; Chairman, Ian Aaron, President/CEO of WAAT Media and former President of the TV Guide Television Group; Samuel Katz, President at Edmond de Rothschild Venture Capital Management Ltd; Larry Marcus, Managing Director, WaldenVC; and Larry Kubal, Managing Partner of Labrador Ventures.
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CODA Genomics Raises $1.6M
Irvine-based CODA Genomics has raised US$1.6M in a Series B financing. The firm raised the new round of funding from Life Science Angels, which led the round, as well as Monitor Ventures and previous investor Tech Coast Angels.
Ken Kelley from Life Science Angels and Neil Bhadkamkar from Monitor Ventures join the company's board as part of the funding. CODA Genomics offers gene kits and services for assembling DNA into single genes. The company's products are used in protein drug discovery research.
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Coradiant Adds Dixon Doll to Board of Directors
Representatives of Coradiant, Inc., a leader in real-user monitoring equipment for Web operations teams, announced this week that Dixon Doll, who founded and is managing general partner for DCM - Doll Capital Management, has joined Coradiant’s board of directors. DCM is an existing Coradiant investor and led the company’s most recent round of venture funding in August 2005.
Doll has been active as a venture capitalist for over 20 years and has been recognized by Forbes magazine as one of the top 100 venture investors on the Midas List for the past four years. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, Doll was the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the DMW Group, an internationally recognized strategic consulting firm focused on the telecommunications and networking sectors.
Coradiant’s technology enables a new category of easy-to-install data monitoring equipment that is capable of seeing and reporting actual performance as experienced by every user, in each session, in real time. Easy to integrate with enterprise management software systems, the equipment features no-risk, drop-in installation, and produces results in less than an hour. Drill-down incident management and analysis can be used to uncover, diagnose and repair even transient, hard-to-find issues in minutes rather than days or weeks.
