Icera takes $45 million more, aspires to IPO

LONDON — Icera Inc., a developer of modems for mobile broadband applications, has said that it has taken a further $45 million in equity financing to help it break into smartphones. This brings the amount invested in the company to about $190 million.

All existing preferred shareholders, including Accel Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital and DFJ Esprit, participated fully in the funding round.

Icera (Bristol, England) had been tipped as a likely candidate for an initial public offering (IPO) of shares and had been boasting of several quarters of growth.

Speaking at a conference in London on Tuesday (May 18) Stan Boland, Icera CEO, said that the company was doing well with in excess of 30 design wins and hoped to get "through the gate" of an IPO. Icera is continuing to extend its market share for chipsets used in mobile broadband devices, such as USB modem sticks and embedded modules for notebooks, netbooks, tablets and other emerging devices. The company said the latest tranche of money would be used to provide additional funding for a move into the smartphone market.

"We are delighted to attract additional equity financing for our business. It comes at a time when we are achieving strong endorsement from mobile network operators and a sharp growth in our shipments to the world's largest device manufacturers," said Boland, in a statement. "The new funding will allow us to expand our customer-facing engineering support and accelerate the dates we propel our technology into the fast-growing smartphone market. Here, our advanced receiver technologies will bring real user gains whilst materially reducing network operators' cost of service delivery."

Icera's adaptive modem technology is focused on 3G (HSPA+, HSPA) and 2G (GSM, GPRS, EDGE) cellular voice and data modem chipsets and firmware, with 4G (LTE) scheduled in the near future. Icera executes the entire modem in software on an Icera application-specific processor.

Related links and articles:

www.icerasemi.com

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