Altair Semiconductor Raises $18M in Series B Funding

Altair Semiconductor, a fabless chip company developing the world's most advanced mobile WiMAX processor for handsets and handheld devices, announced today that it recently closed an $18M Series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP). Bessemer is joined in the round by returning investors BRM Capital, Giza Venture Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), and brings significant wireless industry experience and global strategic relationships to the company.

"Altair welcomes Bessemer Venture Partners as the lead in our latest round of financing. Bessemer joins a consortium of returning investors in providing us with the funds to take our products to market," said Altair CEO and Co-founder, Oded Melamed. "Investment by this world class VC affirms the significance of Altair's architectural approach to resolve critical performance, power-consumption, cost, and size challenges that manufacturers face in integrating mobile WiMAX into handsets and handheld consumer devices."

"BVP's investment is a very strong endorsement of Altair's achievements and the deep experience and expertise of its technical team," said company chairman, Menashe Ezra, Managing Partner at BRM Capital.

Mobile WiMAX presents severe challenges to manufacturers who are integrating this new and evolving standard into handsets. Traditional DSP's and hard-wired ASICs are handicapped respectively, by excessive battery consumption and inflexibility. New and innovative silicon solutions are needed that can deliver the performance/power efficiencies required by mobile WiMAX in handsets and handheld devices. Altair's proprietary ultra-low power, Optimized OFDMA Processor (O2P(TM)), which is at the core of its ALT2150 baseband solution, does just that -- delivering extremely high performance at dramatically lower power consumption than any solution currently on the market or under development.

"We've seen scores of companies attempting to apply traditional architectures to cope with the mobile WiMAX challenge," said Adam Fisher, Partner with BVP. "Altair's innovative approach results in a truly disruptive chip that combines best of class performance with significantly reduced power-consumption, smallest footprint and lowest cost. We believe that Altair's solution will open the door to a whole spectrum of new personal devices that fulfill the mass market vision of mobile WiMAX."

The ALT2150 mobile WiMAX baseband processor is the industry's only IC optimized exclusively for handsets and handheld consumer devices. Based on O2P, and featuring patent pending technologies (TriMAX(TM)) surrounding the coexistence of WiMAX with Bluetooth(R) and WiFi, the ALT2150 is the most effective solution for manufacturers developing mobile WiMAX capable handsets and convergent devices.

Source: Altair