Genoa raises $75M in third round

FREMONT, Calif. -- Genoa Corporation, a next-generation optical semiconductor company in Fremont, CA, announced today that it has raised an additional $75 million.

Investors in this funding round include August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Global Crossing, Investor AB, Levensohn Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Oak Investment Partners, and WorldCom Ventures. This brings total funding for the company to approximately $95 million.

This funding round is being announced simultaneously with Genoa's launch today of the world's first single chip linear optical amplifier (LOA) - a small, cost-effective semiconductor device capable of amplifying light in the optical communications network (see separate press release).

Proceeds will be used to ramp up the company's Indium Phosphide manufacturing facility as well as fund the continued growth in engineering, marketing, and sales. Customer tests of the new LOA are currently underway and commercial samples will be available later this year.

"Genoa is a significant company," said Andy Rappaport of August Capital. "It has invented the first, practical optical equivalent of the transistor. As a result, Genoa can, for the first time, make single-chip optical amplifiers that can work in today's dense, multi-wavelength optical networking applications."

August Capital led the original investment in Genoa in 1998. "In our opinion, Genoa's breakthroughs - which are covered by numerous filed and issued patents - will likely lead to a major restructuring of the economics of the optical communications market, following the path electronics took subsequent to the invention of the transistor amplifier."

The LOA represents the first semiconductor-based optical or "photonic" amplifier able to simultaneously amplify dozens of different wavelengths of light without distortion, even if those wavelengths are unpredictably switched in and out of the communications path.

The tiny chip, which, when packaged, is about the size a sugar cube, is expected to find wide application in optical network equipment ranging from optical cross-connects, high-speed routers, optical add-drop multiplexers, transponders, and DWDM systems, particularly in metropolitan applications.

"Amplifiers will become an increasingly-critical component in the coming generation of optical network equipment as the metropolitan build-out gathers momentum," said Rick Gold, Genoa's president and CEO. "But to date, the cost of amplification has been so high - on the order of $5,000 to $30,000 per amplifier - that widespread use has been restricted to the long-haul applications. Additionally, the poor level of integration achieved to date would argue for optical-based central offices the size of several Empire State Buildings, at the traffic levels forecast in just a few years. With our invention of the first chip-based linear optical amplifier, we are in a position to completely change this."

Genoa's new amplifier is about 1/100th the size of the modular fiber amplifiers that helped revolutionize optical networking in the last decade. But unlike previous attempts at semiconductor-based optical amplifiers, which, in simple terms "scrambled" the data if two or more different signals were amplified at the same time, Genoa's founders solved several fundamental technical problems by inventing an entirely new semiconductor structure, and the manufacturing process to produce it commercially.

This is a significant breakthrough because modern optical communications rely on sending dozens to hundreds of different channels down the same optical fiber, separating them into different frequencies, or colors, of light.

About Genoa Corporation
Genoa is a next-generation optical semiconductor company that has made fundamental breakthroughs leading to the design and manufacture of well-behaved, single-chip linear optical amplifiers. Genoa's disruptive LOA technology is expected to revolutionize the economics of major segments of the optical communications industry by permitting levels of system integration previously only enjoyed by purely electronic products.

Genoa's first product is the Genoa linear optical amplifier, a well-behaved, single-chip indium-phosphide linear optical amplifier optimized for use in metropolitan optical network applications. The Genoa LOA replaces contemporary optical amplifiers 100 times as large with a simple, reliable, cost-effective device suitable for use in the today's demanding dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) applications.

Genoa's unique, indium-phosphide-based linear optical amplifier technology is the subject of several dozen fundamental issued or pending design and manufacturing patents. The company, with 80+ employees, has research, development, wafer fabrication and manufacturing facilities at its Fremont, CA, headquarters, and in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Funding to date is approximately $95 million; investors include August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Global Crossing, Investor AB, Levensohn Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Oak Investment Partners, and WorldCom Ventures. Genoa was founded in 1998 by leaders in optical amplifiers and semiconductor lasers.