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Funding of $16 m saves Novalux from Chapter 11

Novalux, a semiconductor laser company located in Sunnyvale, California, has secured an additional $16 million dollars in venture capital funding to continue developing and manufacturing its NECSEL (Novalux extended cavity surface emitting laser) technology platform.
The funding has effectively rescued Novalux from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company filed for Chapter 11 reorganization on March 11, 2003, which provided it with breathing space to restructure its debt to be conducive to receiving new funding and to continue to pursue its technology and business strategy.

On May 6, the court gave approval for the sale of Novalux s assets to a new corporation, Novalux Acquisition Corporation. NAC was created by a consortium group of three of Novalux s previous investors - Crescendo Ventures, Dynafund Ventures and Morgan Stanley Venture Partners. Both existing and new venture capital investors provided funds to enable the acquisition.

Novalux was founded in May 1998 to provide laser products for the communications market based on its NECSEL platform, and received huge amounts of funding. However, the industry downturn forced the company to reassess the markets to which its technology could be applied.

Novalux began shipping its first product, the Protera visible laser system, in December 2002. The first Protera product provides 5 mW and 15 mW output power at 488 nm, with outstanding output power stability, beam pointing stability, and extremely low optical noise that surpasses incumbent technologies including argon ion lasers and DPSS lasers.

To date, key multinational OEM customers in the Bio-Analytical Instruments market have successfully evaluated and designed the Protera product into their instrumentation. Applications within this market segment include confocal microscopy, DNA sequencing and flow cytometry.

While Novalux is now actively producing and shipping Protera units for revenue, the Company also continues to develop other wavelength versions of the Protera laser that address the bio-analytical instruments market as well as expand the company’s market presence into other market segments.

Next generation Protera lasers have been demonstrated at 460 nm and 530 nm. Additional target markets for Novalux include digital imaging, reprographics, digital photo refinishing, semiconductor inspection, optical data storage, laser displays, and a variety of general scientific research applications that utilize the basic principles of laser induced fluorescence (LIF).

By packaging the NECSEL technology into a variety of patented laser architectures, this new technology is capable of delivering a variety of laser products that will address a large portion of the existing $4.8 billion market for lasers.

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