Icera says its investors have provided a further $45m in equity capital on top of the $200m in VC money it has already received.
“We are delighted to attract additional equity financing for our business”, says Stan Boland, Icera’s CEO, “it comes at a time when we are achieving strong endorsement from mobile network operators and a sharp growth in our shipments to the world’s largest device manufacturers."
"The new funding will allow us to expand our customer-facing engineering support and accelerate the dates we propel our technology into the fast-growing smartphone market. Here, our advanced receiver technologies will bring real user gains whilst materially reducing network operators’ cost of service delivery,” said Boland.
All the existing preferred shareholders, including Accel Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital and DFJ Esprit, participated fully in the funding round, says Icera.
Icera sells chipsets used in mobile broadband devices, such as USB modem sticks and embedded modules for notebooks, netbooks, tablets and other emerging devices.
The new financing will also provide additional funding for the Company’s expansion into the smartphone market.
Icera believes it has technological advantages in the hand-off from HSPA to LTE which will be one of the key areas for 4G cellular telecommunications.
Founded in 2002, Icera set out to provide baseband processors for cell phones, and later took over Sirifics to provide the complete RF/baseband module.
With handset manufacturers looking to get complete wireless subsystems from IC suppliers, including all the software, Icera has found itself concentrating on datacentric applications like dongles.
Winning a baseband design-win at a major handset manufacturer has, as yet, proved elusive as these have aligned themselves with big IC provides like ST-Ericsson, Qualcomm, Broadcom and Infineon.
However the rise of the smartphone could give Icera another opportunity.