$10m round for in-building wireless technology firm
A Cambridge, UK, based company that develops wideband distributed antenna systems that address the challenge of providing continuous radio coverage inside buildings, has successfully raised $10m in funding to support an aggressive growth strategy and global market expansion plan. Zinwave, which was founded in 2002 with unique patented technologies drawn from research groups at Cambridge University and University College London, will use the proceeds from this round of financing to target North America and international markets.
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This funding round was led by SEB Venture Capital and attracted further funding from existing investors Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity partners. The company was advised by GP Bullhound.
The market for in-building wireless coverage is predicted to continue to grow exponentially over the next few years fuelled by emerging technologies and services including 3G, UMTS, CDMA2000, WiMAX, TETRA, LMR, RFID, telemetry, and DVB-H. Accommodating the variety of services and dealing with the certainty of future change demands a single unified in-building wireless infrastructure that can deliver multiple services, system scalability and flexible connectivity. It also needs to be able to accommodate future growth and deliver all of this capability at competitive price points. Zinwave claims that its active wideband solution has been developed to overcome these challenges.
“Everyone hates being out of wireless touch when in-doors or underground,” commented James Raby, investment manager at SEB Venture Capital. “More and more wireless services and network providers are offering greater connectivity to consumers across new pieces of spectrum, a trend we predict will only accelerate. Zinwave leads the way in providing price competitive solutions today that will further enable building owners to ensure the future availability of all these services while also removing their concerns about the risks of future compatibility and capital. We are pleased to be able to support its continued product range growth and sales expansion into the largest US and Asian markets with this new fundraising.”
Commenting on the funding, Jonathan Paget, CEO of Zinwave, said, “This latest investment is a real testament to our strong technology vision, product innovation and market development to date. With this funding in place we now have the momentum to capitalise on our existing sales efforts in Europe and to really bolster our presence in the US where we’ve seen early successes recruiting sales channels and securing customer trials. With 60-70 percent of existing mobile device usage taking place within buildings and the impact of new technologies such as WiMAX driving even more mobile applications such as data and video, we see the in-building wireless market as a huge opportunity and we have the technology and solutions to capitalise on this.”
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© Chilli Publishing Ltd 2008 |
8 MAR 2008 |
