Funding reinforces long-term financial standing

Icera has received a $20 million investment from 3i as an extension to its recent series C funding round, which now totals $60 million.

Icera has received a $20 million investment from 3i as an extension to its recent series C funding round, which now totals $60 million.

3i joins a strong investor group comprising Benchmark Capital Europe, Atlas Venture, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners.

Icera has now attracted over $100 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2002.

The new funding reinforces Icera's strong, long-term financial standing and positions Icera to execute on its expansion strategy and to establish leadership in the cellular wireless market.

Icera's technology - the Livanto wireless soft modem - is a disruptive new architecture for mobile phones and datacards.

Together with Icera's Adaptive Wireless software, Livanto delivers the world's highest performance cellular broadband via the latest version of the 3G air interface standard, HSDPA, enabling consumers to download large email files with attachments, speedily access web pages and download music tracks onto media players over the air in seconds.

Already supporting 2.5G standards, GSM, GPRS and Edge, Livanto will be developed for additional air interfaces, including HSUPA, WiMAX and Mobile Digital Video, which can be consolidated on the same device.

Stan Boland, President and CEO of Icera, said: "We're very pleased that 3i has made this substantial investment in Icera and excited they recognise that the baseband modem is the technology pivotal to mobile phones".

"3i has an excellent track record as an investor in early-stage companies and in helping them to become huge successes, the most recent example being CSR".

"With their expertise in private equity, as well as in venture capital, we also have more capability to consider developing our business plans inorganically and to leverage our technology into creating a large, successful wireless chipset and software company".

Laurence Garrett, the 3i partner joining the Icera board, added: "We have known Icera for some time and it's a pleasure for us to be joining this strong VC syndicate in backing Icera's superb management team".

"From our experience in the wireless semiconductor market, via investments like TTPCom, UbiNetics and DiBcom, we believe that Icera is already amongst the top three private semiconductor firms in the world and we are excited to work with the team to build the next multi-billion-dollar business which will revolutionise mobile phone design".

Early versions of Livanto have been sampling since September 2005, in parallel with achieving interoperability and network testing.

As the physical layer and protocols are all in Adaptive Wireless software, advanced receivers and diversity support are delivering dramatic performance advantages in HSDPA, doubling sector capacity and halving baseband costs.

The fundamental new soft architecture of Livanto breaks the vicious cycle of handset availability lagging infrastructure for new standards.

As well as being among the first to market with a 3.6Mbit/s HSDPA solution, Icera aims to drive the availability of faster and more complex standards through software upgrades on the same Livanto device - but without the time and cost of developing, verifying and manufacturing new silicon.

OEMs can deliver the same terminal, tailored to the standards and features of different geographic or consumer markets through software instead of hardware changes, quickly and easily.

After sale, they can be field-upgraded as new infrastructure is rolled-out: a revolution in handset communications technology.

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