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Zinwave riding on the crest after $10m funding round

Written by Sam Fountain

Thursday, 06 March 2008

Zinwave CEO, Jonathan Paget Following on from a successful outing at last month's 3GSM, in-building wireless communications pioneer, Zinwave has announced the close of its second round of funding, netting the company $10m (£4.9m). The investment comes hot on the heels of the launch of the Zinwave 3000, a unique wideband active distributed antenna system (DAS), at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month. The Harston-based company says the funding will enable it to continue its product innovation and strengthen its existing mobile operator and sales channel relationships throughout the US, Europe, and into the rest of EMEA and Asia. “This latest investment is a real testament to our strong technology vision, product innovation and market development to date,”  said Zinwave’s CEO, Jonathan Paget. “With this funding in place we now have the momentum to capitalise on our existing sales efforts in Europe and to really bolster our presence in the US where we’ve seen early successes recruiting sales channels and securing customer trials.” This latest round was led by SEB Venture Capital as well as attracting further funding from existing investors Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity partners. "Everyone hates being out of wireless touch when in-doors or underground,” commented James Raby, Investment Manager at SEB Venture Capital.  “More and more wireless services and network providers are offering greater connectivity to consumers across new pieces of spectrum, a trend we predict will only accelerate.” “Zinwave leads the way in providing price competitive solutions today that will further enable building owners to ensure the future availability of all these services while also removing their concerns about the risks of future compatibility and capital,” said Raby. The market for in-building wireless coverage is predicted to continue to grow exponentially over the next few years fuelled by emerging technologies and services including 3G; UMTS; CDMA2000; WiMAX; TETRA; LMR; RFID; Telemetry, and DVB-H. “With 60-70 percent of existing mobile device usage taking place within buildings and the impact of new technologies such as WiMAX driving even more mobile applications such as data and video, we see the in-building wireless market as a huge opportunity and we have the technology and solutions to capitalise on this,” said Paget. The Zinwave Active Wideband solution has been developed to meet a variety of customer demands, including the ability to deliver multiple services, system scalability and flexible connectivity whilst also being able to accommodate future growth – and all of this capability at competitive price points.   Another selling point for the Zinwave DAS technology is its ability to utilize the pre-installed fibre that is readily available in most new buildings, like offices and airports. This factor significantly reduces installation costs. This is all part of the reasoning behind an agreement signed in January that named Magdalene as Zinwave’s first distributor and network service partner in France. Nicolas Grante, general manager of Magdalene France, said, "Zinwave's in-building solution is also able to support emerging wireless standards, future-proofing the initial capital investment. The ease of planning and deployment makes Zinwave's proposition extremely compelling, and we anticipate high-levels of adoption in 2008." Magdelene is as optimistic about the future as Zinwave. According to Grante, “At present, Zinwave's DAS is the only unified wideband solution able to deliver emergency and other wireless services simultaneously, and therefore interest from operators and end-user companies for their technology is especially high." "Furthermore",he said, "many operators are looking to adopt technologies that will enable their customers to easily integrate additional services such as Wi-Fi and WiMax.” Zinwave was founded in 2002 and uses patented technology developed at Cambridge University and University College of London. In September 2006, $8m (£3.9m) was raised in its first round of funding. Set as favorite Bookmark Email This Hits: 821 Trackback(0) TrackBack URI for this entry Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Write comment This content has been locked. You can no longer post any comment.

 

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