April 6, 2017
Optical transceiver developer ColorChip says it recently received $17 million in funding, capping its most recent round at a total of $37 million. CIRTech fund led the funding; Scale-Up fund contributed as well.
ColorChip plans to use the cash to accelerate go-to-market initiatives, expand its manufacturing capabilities, and fund research and development. The company says it hired 100 employees over the past year, with an expectation that it will add another 50 people in 2017. This year’s additions will beef up the operations and engineering groups as well as R&D.
The new funding and talent base will support the development and release of what ColorChip described as “several” products in the next two years, with PAM4-enabled 200-Gbps and 400-Gbps applications a focus. These new products likely will leverage the company’s SystemOnGlass technology, a glass-based photonic integration platform (see “PLC development gets active”). ColorChip has leveraged the platform to create products across a wide variety of applications since its founding in 2001, starting with FTTH products before moving to data center optical transceivers.
Via a press release, Yigal Ezra, ColorChip’s CEO, said, “The space of web 2.0 and cloud providers is growing at an unprecedented rate and ColorChip solutions and roadmap are in high demand. The company is building capabilities to support mega data centers in the U.S. and Asia, while developing next generation 400G solutions.”
Alex Lazovsky, managing partner at CIRTech Fund and Scale-Up, has joined ColorChip’s board of directors in the wake of the recent funding round. ColorChip raised the first part of the $37 million round last summer (see “Optical transceiver vendor ColorChip raises $20 million”). Other funding rounds include $25 million in 2015, $9.5 million in 2006, and $7.4 million in 2007.