News Article
JVP Jump Aboard the CyOptics InP PIC Train with $50 million
The transaction includes secondary purchases from several existing shareholders and equity investment in the company to drive growth and expansion.
JVP, an Israeli venture capitalist, has invested $50 million into CyOptics, a provider of Indium Phosphide (InP) optical chip and component products.
The transaction entailed the purchase of shares from several existing shareholders and the financing of additional growth capital for the Company. Joining the round were existing CyOptics investors Sprout Group, Birchmere Ventures and Eurofund.
The photonics industry is once again entering a growth phase driven by demand from wireless backhaul, cloud computing, data centre congestion, video downloading and social networking. Bandwidth demands are doubling every 18 months and CyOptics says its optical transmit and receive sub-components are enabling this growth. The company's InP and Silicon Optics device technologies are enabling high-speed broadband connections up to 100Gb/s.
CyOptics products are targeted at the consumer fibre-to-the home (FTTH) market, the U.S. defence market, and to the production of next generation of photonic integrated circuits.
The Company generated over $100 million in revenues in 2010 and ended the year with a strong sales backlog, granting good visibility into 2011.
“CyOptics is uniquely positioned to bring together all of the critical technologies required to design and manufacture high performance optical devices,” said Ed Coringrato, CyOptics CEO.
“This incremental investment will help to fund the working capital needed to bolster near term revenue growth and to support research & development required to deliver the next generation products and services our customers require.”
"As the relative share of web traffic comprising media and video continues to grow, our communications networks will be required to deliver unprecedented levels of bandwidth. CyOptics’ high speed, high performance solutions will increasingly enable the fulfilment of consumer demand for evolving entertainment, educational, and gaming applications. The company’s accelerated growth over the past twelve months is a clear testament to this," commented Erel Margalit, founder and managing partner of JVP, and CyOptics Chairman.
"Over the past decade, we have worked closely with the CyOptics’ management to build the Company into a leading independent global organization. The Company's strong underlying technology, broad portfolio of products, and successful acquisition and integration capabilities, position it for continued growth as a prominent player in the industry," continued Margalit.
JVP will nominate an additional member to the Board of Directors following the transaction.
