Ottawa, Canada-based SiGe makes most of its money selling wireless LAN silicon, which go into laptops, Cisco routers and some printers, said CFO Bill Burke.
It also sells chips for global positioning systems, mostly for personal navigation devices. But the company hopes in the near- to mid-term to launch GPS silicon for smart phones. He noted SiGe’s GPS business was currently its fastest growing.
SiGe also is developing chips for WiMax, where it doesn’t expect to see revenue until late next year or 2009, Burke said. It’s an area where we’re spending a significant amount of development spend probably the most for our future operations, he said.
The company, which has raised a total of $131m in total since 2000, having been spun out from the National Research Council in Canada a year earlier, focuses on end-user mobile devices, such as smartphones and notebooks, rather than networking gear.
Burke said Samsung was the only company it approached for a strategic investment, and the goal is to sell its silicon in Samsung devices. He stopped short of saying future Samsung smartphones would sport SiGe WiMax silicon. Our hope is for significant synergies, he said.
The company has about 105 workers, in the US, Canada, UK and Hong Kong, and last year grew revenue 55%, Burke said. We want this to be our last round until we’re profitable, he said. Pretty much all our growth has been in the wireless LAN area to date, but we think the GPS and WiMax opportunities are as great.
SiGe would likely be profitable within the next year, he said.
The recent financing will be spent on product development, sales and marketing.
Existing investors 3i Group, Prism VentureWorks, TD Capital Ventures, VenGrowth Private Equity Partners, RWI Ventures and GrowthWorks also participated in the recent round. SiGe also recently appointed a new chief executive Sohall Khan, formerly with Bessemer Venture Partners.
