April 12, 2004 Mountain View, CA--Cortina Systems, a developer of analog and digital integrated circuits for the networking and communications space, announced today that it has closed a $20 million round of venture capital financing. The round, an extension of the B Round of financing initially concluded in February 2003, was led by Kodiak Venture Partners (Waltham, MA) and joined by Hotung Capital Management (Taipei), both first time investors. Dave Furneaux, managing general partner at Kodiak, joins the Cortina board of directors.
All of Cortina's existing venture capital investors participated in the extension, including Morgenthaler Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and INVESCO Private Capital.
The company also announced that it had appointed two senior executives. Bruce Margetson becomes vice president and chief financial officer and Behrooz Yadegar becomes vice president in charge of all operations.
"This supplemental funding, combined with the addition of a two key executives, effectively completes the foundation for what we believe will become a major, stand-alone semiconductor company," says Amir Nayyerhabibi, co-founder and chief executive of Cortina. "The funding is also a validation of the substantial progress Cortina has made with the world's leading communications system vendors." Cortina, he says, will use the funding to expand the company's family of multiservice, multiprotocol integrated circuits.
Cortina Systems is currently shipping products to numerous customers in North America, Europe, China and Japan. Those shipments began in December 2002 when Cortina introduced its highly integrated devices that combine very high-speed analog and digital capabilities on the same chip. Cortina's ICs are also designed to support such protocols as resilient packet ring and Ethernet media access controllers, SONET/SDH/Ethernet framers, and high speed SERDES, running at multiple rates from OC-3 to OC-192 and Gigabit Ethernet to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. This capability significantly simplifies physical communication at Layers 1 and 2, and dramatically lowers the cost and electrical power requirement of routers, switches, and transport equipment
In addition, Cortina claims it is the first, and so far, only semiconductor company to successfully integrate the new XFP standard optical interface into its ICs. Use of XFP promises to significantly reduce power and footprint requirements across all communications systems.
"Today's announcement represents an exciting next step in Kodiak's ongoing support for the efforts of Amir and his proven team of entrepreneurs, who we backed in a past venture," said Dave Furneaux. "Cortina already is emerging as the clear leader in delivering mixed signal and digital ICs on schedule and with great sensitivity to customer needs. Cortina has what it takes to build a world-class, long-term company and we are very pleased to be a part of that."