Jul 15 2007
Xponent Photonics, the leading manufacturer of Surface Mount Photonic components, announced it has secured $23 million in Series 3 funding.
The funding round was led by American River Ventures, which is making its first investment in the company. In addition to American River Ventures, Xponent's existing investors including Arcturus Capital, Eastward Capital, El Dorado Ventures, HOYA Holdings, Samsung, US Venture Partners, and Walden International also participated in the funding.
"This new round of financing will allow us to accelerate the market penetration of Surface Mount Photonics beyond the FTTx market. Xponent is already sampling low cost, high performance optical components to datacom, CATV and consumer markets," said Jeffrey S. Rittichier, Xponent's President and CEO. "We are pleased to welcome Dr. Barbara Grant to our Board of Directors. Barbara is a former CEO herself and has deep operating expertise in wafer fab operations from her experience at IBM."
"The communications industry has been trying to build optical components like semiconductors for the past 20 years with little success until Xponent's revolutionary Surface Mount Photonic platform was introduced," said Dr. Barbara Grant, Partner - American River Ventures. "The most exciting development at Xponent isn't just their groundbreaking technology; it is that they've successfully transferred the technology into volume production at merchant Si foundries and conventional IC packaging operations." Dr. Grant went on to say, "Xponent is the only company shipping production volumes of active devices based on a Silicon platform. We're thrilled to be working with Xponent's team and are confident that they are on the road to a great success."
Xponent is producing production volumes of FTTx components based on its revolutionary Surface Mount Photonic technology. By leveraging the enormous manufacturing assets and expertise of merchant wafer foundries and traditional semiconductor packaging technology, Xponent is driving industry leading performance and manufacturing costs into optical components. The company has now extended the technology in its award winning FTTx components into CATV and 10G Telecom.