Luxtera adds $21.7 million in Series C, new board member

Silicon CMOS photonics company Luxtera says it has closed $21.7 million in Series C funding. It also has added Martin Colombatto to its board of directors.

The latest funding round included inside investment from NEA, August Capital, Sevin Rosen, Funds, and Lux Capital. New investors include Tokyo Electron and a “personal investment” from a mystery source the company would describe only as “an industry titan.”

Colombatto arrives on the Luxtera board having most recently served as the CEO and president of Staccato Communications, a San Diego-based Ultra Wide Band (UWB)/wireless USB company. Prior to Staccato, Colombatto served as the vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s Networking Business Unit.

“This is an exciting time for Luxtera and I am honored to be joining an organization that is seeding technology poised to be as disruptive as the mass production of CMOS photonics in silicon,” said Colombatto. “There is incredible talent at Luxtera and I look forward to helping to shape this defining industry transition as silicon CMOS photonics overcomes the limitations of copper interconnect.”

The funding announcement came shortly after Cisco announced its plans to acquire a Luxtera competitor, Lightwire (see “Cisco to acquire CMOS silicon photonics firm Lightwire”). Unlike Lightwire, however, Luxtera has had success bringing products to market. In fact, it announced last week that it has shipped a million channels worth of silicon CMOS photonics products (see “Luxtera ships one-millionth silicon CMOS photonics-enabled 10G channel”).