Icera Semiconductor seems to walk on water. The four year-old company always seems to have investors willing to come up with more cash, and it always seems to have ambitious spending plans.
This is unusual for a chip start-up where the frugality of the entrepreneur is usually matched only by the meanness of the VC.
Somehow, Icera has stepped outside this bleak formula and entered sunny uplands where the VCs are always shelling out lolly, and the entrepreneur can pursue his plans unfettered by inconvenient purse-strings.
For instance, a few months ago, Icera was announcing a third design centre, addition to design centres in Bristol and Nice, which was to be in Cambridge, and which would be staffed by 25 designers. Now it has announced it will staff the Cambridge centre with up to 75 designers.
Already the company has 190 on the pay-roll. The cash burn is $1.5m a month. That’s down from last April’s cash burn of $2.5m, so revenues are beginning to flow. However, the new head-count additions will take the staffing level up near 250 and the cash burn not far short of $2m a month.
This is aggressive stuff when the company’s product is the baseband processor for mobile hand-sets, and when the company has yet to win a design-in in a mobile phone handset.
Icera is finding, maybe to its surprise, that there’s a ready market for mobile telecoms chip-sets in data-cards, and in USB sticks, and embedded in lap-top computers.
Icera has raised $140m and, according to company executives, has more funding waiting to be announced and more investors, one of them a new investor, waiting to put more money in.
It seems a happy formula. Just unusual.
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