Venture Capital News
Motorola Steps Up Investment in China in 2006
Representatives of Motorola, Inc. announced Wednesday three new investments in China. With these new investments, Motorola hopes to continue exploring opportunities and growing investing momentum further in China.
Through Motorola Ventures, the venture capital arm of Motorola, the global telecom giant has invested in Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital Enterprise (Shanghai NewMargin), Shenzhen Shenxun Information Technology Development Co. Ltd. (SXIT) and Legend Silicon Corp., parent company of Legend Silicon Beijing (Legend Silicon). These investments are indicative of Motorola’s continuing commitment to the China market.
Motorola has become one of the largest investors of Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital Enterprise, originally established with a US$35-million private equity fund. The VC company will continue to focus on high-tech companies, high-growth or high-potential companies in China.
Motorola has also formed strategic cooperation with SXIT while making a significant investment in its parent company – China Internet Technology and Service Ltd. Besides, Motorola will cooperate with SXIT on both platform and applications such as LBS and enterprise solutions.
Through this cooperation, Motorola expects to increase its ability to provide customers with unique and customized services, including enterprise solutions, A-GPS, LBS, MMS, 3G applications, content, and client applications.
The alliance between Motorola and Legend Silicon focuses on the design, development, and manufacturing of demodulator chips for the emerging mobile TV businesses. With mobile TV being seen as the ‘Next Big Thing’ in the 3G era, this investment is expected to help Motorola gain a strong foothold in the mobile TV industry in China, which is widely expected to be one of the leading players in the 3G market.
Motorola is the largest foreign investor in China’s electronics industry with more than 9,000 employees in China. Since coming to China in 1987, Motorola has made its commitment to China a long-term strategy. By the end of 2005, Motorola’s total investment in this country reached US$3.6 billion. Motorola’s commitment to China continues to increase, showcased in part, by its venture investment program. These investments are expected to bring much-needed funding, technology and management know-how to local Chinese entrepreneurs.
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BioSciences Announces $40 Million Funding Round
Representatives of Helicos BioSciences, a pioneer in high-speed, high-sensitivity DNA sequencing, announced Wednesday that it has secured new investments totaling US$40 million from a syndicate of top-tier venture capital firms, in support of the company's development of "true Single Molecule Sequencing" (tSMS TM) technologies and techniques.
The financing was provided by Helicos BioSciences' current investors, which include: Flagship Ventures, Atlas Venture, Highland Capital, MPM Capital, and Versant Ventures. The latest funding follows an initial investment of $27 million by the same syndicate of investors, made at the company's founding in February 2004.
Helicos BioSciences Corporation began operations in February 2004, after raising $27 million from a top-tier investment consortium. Helicos is developing instruments and reagents for the high-speed sequencing of DNA and RNA with the highest possible sensitivity. The Helicos technology, based on the work of Dr. Stephen Quake and Dr. Ido Braslavsky, promises to revolutionize biomedical research and healthcare. tSMS TM will allow the comparison of genes and genomes from thousands of individuals or cells, and allow the detection of very rare mutations. High-speed, ultra-sensitive sequencing will enable biomedical experiments never before possible. Ensuing discoveries will lead to accurate molecular diagnostics for cancer and other diseases, individualized drug therapies, and personalized medical treatments.
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Sipera Secures $13.2 Million Series B Funding
Representatives of Sipera Systems, a leader in pure security for VoIP, mobile and multimedia communications, announced Wednesday that the company has secured US$13.2M in series B round funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, and includes prior investors Austin Ventures and STAR Ventures. This latest funding brings Sipera's total to $19.5M and will help the company expand operations and extend its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) security solution to wireless operators.
Mike Goguen, a Sequoia Capital General partner who has successfully guided numerous VoIP and security firms such as NetScreen, Redback and Spatial Wireless, will join the Board of Directors for Sipera Systems.
Recently launched at VoiceCon Spring 2006, Sipera IPCS products represent the most comprehensive pure security solution for protecting real-time IP communications applications such as VoIP, instant messaging (IM), video and multimedia. The Sipera IPCS 310 is deployed within the network to protect both the infrastructure and end-users from a number of malicious, application-specific attacks and service abuse.
Sipera IPCS products can be deployed in any existing VoIP infrastructure with no need for on-site interoperability testing, due to Sipera's close development and integration work with leading VoIP infrastructure manufacturers. The Sipera IPCS 310 product is not a point-of-failure in the network and is not subject to attack, as it is deployed without an IP address with no network configuration changes — preserving network integrity and user uptime, for fast ROI.
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Tira Wireless Secures $13 Million In Funding
Representatives of Tira Wireless, a provider of advanced technology for mobile content deployment, announced Thursday that the company has secured US$13 million in Series C funding. The new investment, led by Lehman Ventures and joined by existing investors Brightspark Ventures, Flagship Ventures and Export Development Canada, will be used to round out Tira's Jump platform to include all data types including music and video; and expand the company's global support and distribution.
The Tira Jump platform, based on patent-pending technology manages the entire set of deployment processes of mobile data including planning, adaptation, optimization, localization, quality assurance, certification, carrier and portal packaging.
Using the Tira Jump platform fundamentally lowers the total cost of mobile content deployment by two thirds while enabling mobile data publishers complete management, reliability, consistency and process control through Jump's integrated Workflow and Asset Management engines. The award-winning Tira Jump technology platform combines in-depth knowledge of mobile content deployment processes with the most powerful and flexible features of digital asset management and workflow systems.
Offered for license or as a service through Tira Wireless, the Tira Jump Product Suite enables mobile content developers and publishers to control, adapt, optimize and deploy mobile applications across more than 500 different handsets. To date more than 80 percent of the world's leading mobile content publishers have used Tira Jump technology to create and deploy top selling mobile games and applications in multiple languages. The platform currently handles mobile Java and BREW applications for all carriers in North America and Western Europe and some parts of Asia.
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gNumber Completes Venture Capital Funding
gNumber, Inc.,a leading provider of mobile e-commerce services and developer of UnWired Buyer(TM) for eBay, today announced that the company had secured $1.5 million in venture funding. Accent Texas Fund I, L.P. led the round with participation from Aegis Texas Venture Fund, DFJ Mercury, and Gefinor Ventures. The funding will be used to expand marketing and product development for UnWired Buyer, the real-time mobile bidding solution for the eBay users.
UnWired Buyer is a free, eBay compatible application that allows users to bid on eBay listings using any mobile phone. Three minutes before the end of a selected auction-style listing, UnWired Buyer places a call to the user. The user is provided with dynamically updated status on an item, including real- time changes in price status. UnWired Buyer users can place new bids or increase previous bids instantly using simple touch-tone commands. UnWired Buyer allows users to participate in the exciting last minute action until the listing closes. With several thousand current users, UnWired Buyer has demonstrated rapid customer adoption for its powerful yet easy-to-use service.
The new investment syndicate provides further validation for the strong technology offering from gNumber. "We are pleased by the interest level from the Texas investment community leading to an oversubscribed round," said Indraj Gill CEO of gNumber, Inc. "This round of funding will help us reach more buyers & sellers, and enhance our services to eBay users."
gNumber, Inc., develops and delivers real-time, customized e-commerce services to mobile phones, using Internet Protocol over Voice or "IPoV(TM)" based technology. The company has patents pending on many aspects of securely delivering and interacting with time-critical online services, via enhanced voice applications. UnWired Buyer for eBay, is an eBay Compatible Application and is provided free of charge to consumers. UnWired Buyer can be used on any mobile phone and is currently available for U.S. eBay users only. gNumber is a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas.
