Private Equity Week Wire for Monday 3/11

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA — Nomadix, a leader in mobility solutions for wireless networks, announced today it has closed a $9 million round of financing from both existing and new investors. Current investors who participated with follow-on investments were Avtech Ventures, the Intel Communications Fund and Smart Technology Ventures. The company is pleased to announce the addition of Keystone Venture Capital to this round of funding.

SAN DIEGO— Phenomix, a privately held forward genetics company focusing on rapid target identification and validation, announced today that it has secured $12 million in first-round funding with the option to draw on an additional $20 million. The investment round was co-led by Sofinnova Ventures and Alta Partners, and includes Bay City Capital, CM Capital Investments, CMEA Ventures, Novartis Bioventure Fund, Rothschild Bioscience Managers, Versant Ventures and others.

SEATTLE — Monet Mobile Networks, a Seattle-based company that provides fast, mobileaccess to the complete Internet, today announced it closed $32 million infinancing and rolled out its second CDMA2000 1X market in Fargo, N.D. The announcement comes on the heels of commercial availability of Monet’swireless Internet service in Sioux Falls, S.D., where the company deployed thefirst data-only CDMA2000 1X network in the United States last October.

Testament to investor confidence in Monet is that most of the company’slargest backers including Mayfield, Soros Private Equity, and Hook Partnershave stepped up to the plate again. LG Electronics, who supplied Monet withits CDMA2000 1X infrastructure equipment, and QUALCOMM have invested as well.

SAN JOSE, CA — SiRF Technology Inc., the leading developer of global positioning system (GPS) enabled location technology, today announced it has closed a Series H round of financing for $19.6 million, bringing the company’s total funding to approximately $80 million. This round of financing will be used to continue SiRF’s future product development, production ramp up and marketing activities for its key strategic target markets: wireless handheld products, automotive, consumer electronics and mobile computing.

New corporate investors include Matsushita Group Ltd. and Conexant Systems Inc. New institutional investors include the Wasatch Funds and President International Development Corporation. In addition, many existing investors participated in this round, including China Development Industrial Bank, Fat Capital, ICCP Ventures, Inc. and Tallwood Venture Capital. SiRF also announced a previous receipt of strategic funding from several leading corporations such as Intel Corporation, Dell Computer, and Mobile Internet Capital, Inc. (an affiliate of NTT DoCoMo).

PURCHASE, NY — Interliant Inc. (NASDAQ:INIT), a leading provider of managed infrastructure services, announced today that it consummated the funding transaction announced by the company on February 14, 2002, with affiliates of Charterhouse Group International Inc., and Mobius Venture Capital for an aggregate $10 million investment. This transaction closed and was funded on March 8, 2002.

FRAMINGHAM, MA — Netezza Corp. today announced that it completed a round of financing from top-tier venture capitalist firms totaling $20 million. Led by Battery Ventures, the series B round includes initial investors Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures and brings the Company’s total funding to more than $28 million.

Netezza has a created a breakthrough platform that transforms slow and expensive business intelligence (BI) activities into agile information. The purpose-built platform can run ad hoc and complex tera-scale queries in a fraction of the time of existing solutions, delivering fast and affordable BI to Fortune 1000 companies.
SAN JOSE, CA — Resonext Communications Inc., an emerging developer of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) semiconductor products, announced today that it has successfully completed the closing of its $25 million series C equity round, bringing the total amount of equity financing issued, raised, and committed to more than $53.5 million since the company’s inception in 2000. The Series C equity round was co-led by INVESCO Private Capital and WK Technology Fund. Existing investors, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Bessemer Venture Partners and Oak Investment Partners also participated in the round. The company will use the new capital to continue to bring current products into production, build out sales and marketing channels, and continue its next-generation product development. Also announced today, Esfandiar Lohrasbpour of INVESCO Private Capital and Dr. Keh-Shew Lu of WK Technology Fund, join Resonext’s board of directors.

SUNNYVALE, CA — Azanda Network Devices, an innovator in the development of silicon products for managing the way traffic is processed in network core, edge and enterprise markets, today announced it has secured $19 million in its Series B financing round. Series A investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Commonwealth Capital Ventures co-led the round, and Series A investor Goldman Sachs also participated as a significant investor in the new round. Today’s announcement brings the total capital raised by Azanda Network Devices since the company’s inception to over $29 million. Azanda raised $10 million from its first round of funding in 2000.

The only independent company focused on best-of-breed traffic management, Azanda will use this new round of financing to further drive to market its silicon products for network co-processing functions. Azanda is currently finalizing the commercialization of its next-generation technology for a variety of products, including OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) and OC-192 (10 Gbps) traffic management for the optical metro network, the access portion of core networks, and enterprise networks at the WAN edge.

NEW YORK — The Sprout Group announced today the promotion of Wayne Nemeth to Partner. Mr. Nemeth joined the Sprout Group in 1998 with prior venture capital and operational experience and currently focuses on datacom, telecom and software technology investing.

Prior to joining the Sprout Group, Mr. Nemeth focused on telecommunications and software investing at Bachow & Associates. Prior to his venture capital career, he was at Booz Allen & Hamilton providing strategic and operational consulting to technology and manufacturing businesses. Mr. Nemeth also worked for the Boeing Company as a supervisor and an engineer in aerodynamics, focusing on a number of programs including the 777 airplane.

FREMONTCA — WaveSplitter Technologies Inc., a worldwide supplier of integrated optical components and modules for advanced optical networks, today announced that it has raised $20 million in new equity financing. The principal investors in the round were Mayfield and NIF Ventures. Other participants included Lucent Venture Partners, North America Venture Fund (affiliated with China Development Industrial Bank), Star Ventures and Kalkhoven, Pettit & Levin Ventures.

PITTSBURGH — TimeSys Corp. today announced that it has secured $15.5 Million in equity financing. Adams Capital Management led the round with participation from The Hillman Company, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), Philips Electronics, a division of Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG; AEX: PHI), and Nissin Systems. Larry Weidman, TimeSys’ CEO also participated in the round with a personal investment. Funds from these strategic investors and two leading national venture capital firms provide TimeSys with the capital necessary to execute its aggressive product strategy and bring the technology it pioneered into the marketplace.

LAWRENCE, MA — Aegis Semiconductor, a leading developer of solutions for embedded monitoring of advanced optical networks, announced today the completion of its second round of venture financing for $16 Million. The capital will be used to accelerate the delivery of the company’s monitoring products. St. Paul Venture Capital led the deal, and was joined by Alta Partners, YankeeTek Ventures, Technology Venture Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Megunticook Management.

MUNICH — Springtoys of Finland, a Wellington Partners holding company, and Finnish Codeonline Oy are merging to become the world`s leading player in the fast-growing market for mobile entertainment applications. Moreover, the new company, which will be doing business as Codeonline, will be receiving a total of Euro 2.8 million from its investors for further expansion. In addition to Wellington Partners, Sonera and Eqvitec of Finland, as well as U.S.-based Shamrock, will also be participating in this round of funding. The company`s shareholders additionally include the world`s second largest supplier of mobile phones, Motorola.

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Wayport Inc., the leading provider of Wi-Fi (802.11b) wireless and wired high-speed Internet service to business travelers with a nationwide network of 450 hotels and nine airports, has secured $15 million in venture funding to boost direct sales efforts, roaming partnerships and network expansion activities. The investors include Invesco Private Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, New Enterprise Associates, Bank of America Venture Partners, Lucent Venture Partners, Trellis Partners, GC Technology Fund, Sanders Morris Harris and Star Ventures.

AUSTIN, TEXAS — MessageOne Inc., the provider of the first easily deployed, enterprise-widemessaging management solution, today announced that it has received a total of$18 million in venture capital from New York venture capital firms RREVentures, Impact Venture Partners and StarVest Partners L.P. MessageOne was founded in 2000 by Adam Dell, managing general partner ofImpact Venture Partners. Dell incubated the company, and Impact VenturePartners provided $8 million in two initial rounds of funding. In January,MessageOne received $10 million in a third round of venture funding, which wasled by RRE Ventures and included StarVest Partners L.P. and Impact VenturePartners.

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