IPtronics (Denmark) - Jan 2008

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01 January 2008

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Sunstone Capital and Creandum have together led a $10.25m series B round in IPtronics, a Danish semiconductor business. The two investors invested an equal amount which totalled significantly more than half of the entire round. Also contributing in the round was existing investor 10IPT10 and the management. Sunstone has been familiar with the team behind the company for the past six to seven years, and was looking for a co-investor to participate in this first venture round. Creandum was deemed a strong co-investor due to the firm’s similar investment strategy, fund lifetime and size. The two investors were attracted to the deal because of the company’s management, strong technical capability and global commercialisation opportunities.

The investment will be used to fund the next generation products and scale up sales and marketing initiatives. With this round, the company is fully funded, according to base plans, for the two next years.

Company

The business was founded in 2003 by the management, entrepreneurs and technical staff behind GIGA A/S that was sold to Intel Corporation in 2000 for $1.25bn. It is a supplier of integrated circuits to the emerging market for parallel optical interconnects, which is anticipated to replace electrical high speed connections in the next generation computer systems and storage networks. It also offers four- and 12-channel solutions with up to 12.5Gbps/channel that lower the power consumption of optical interconnections factor. It is based in Roskilde, but has also recently established a sales office in Palo Alto.

People

Sunstone Capital managing partner Jimmy Fussing Nielsen worked on the deal and will join the board together with Creandum general partner Martin Hauge. Niels Finseth is the founder and CEO of IPtronics. Jørgen Bardenfleth is the chairman of the board.

Advisers

Company - Pactum, Søren Holmark (Legal)Equity - Deloitte, Kim Mücke (Financial Due Diligence)Equity - NKT Group, Andreas Tycho, Anette Hegner (Other Due Diligence)Equity - Paul Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, Qin Shi (Other Due Diligence)

Sourced from: Nordic unquote" 71 (Feb 2008)