Kaiam closes funding round, targets volume manufacturing

Optical component and transceiver developer Kaiam Corp. says it has closed an approximately $35 million round of new equity investment. The company will use the new wealth to fund volume manufacturing of products based on its hybrid photonic integration expertise.

The new round nearly doubled the amount of equity funding the company had raised to date. The money came from two new strategic investors that Kaiam did not identify, as well as existing investors.

Kaiam was founded in 2010. It acquired expanded its hybrid integration capabilities through the acquisition of planar lightwave circuit specialist Gemfire and its Livingston, Scotland fab in 2013 (see "Kaiam to acquire Gemfire assets"). The company has been active at both 40-Gbps and 100-Gbps data rates (see, for example, "Kaiam debuts with 40-Gbps LR4 transmitter, receiver optical subassemblies" and "Kaiam to demo 10x10G 100G DWDM CFP at OFC/NFOEC"). It also is a member of the CWDM4 and 100G CL4 MSAs aimed at 2-km applications in the 100 Gigabit Ethernet data center market.

The company is now ramping production of actives and PLC products in Livingston, and much of the new investment will go toward expansion of that fab, Kaiam revealed. The company also hopes to fund new product development.

"I’m very pleased that this round is generated from within the industry," said Bardia Pezeshki, CEO. "This is validation that our current and future products are on target to address our customers’ needs."

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