Mellanox raises $102 million with IPO on Nasdaq

LONDON — Mellanox Technologies Ltd. has completed its IPO on Nasdaq and raised $102 million, valuing the developer of interconnect chips at just over $510 million.

The Yokneam, Israel-based company plans to use the net proceeds from the offering to fund product development and for corporate purposes, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company originally hoped to make the flotation at $14-16 per share. It ultimately held it at $17 per share, and selling 6 million shares, 20 percent of the company, represents a valuation of about $510 million.

Founded in 1999, Mellanox specializes in chips for Infiniband devices that connect servers with storage and networking devices for data transmission. Last year, the company, in perhaps the biggest sign of silicon-level convergence in the sector, announced its ConnectX architecture, which packs support for Ethernet and Infiniband into one chip.

A top goal for the 90-nm ConnectX architecture is to let server blade makers consolidate support for Infiniband and Ethernet into one chip that also provides some support for Fibre Channel and iSCSI.

Mellanox says all the major server makers, such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and IBM, are already using Infiniband in their blade servers.

Mellanox competes against the likes of Emulex Corp., Broadcom, QLogic and Myricom, and has received funding from some large corporations such as Dell Inc., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc.,