Icera, the mobile broadband semiconductor company which products we’ve already covered in the past, announced that its investors have provided a further $45 million in equity capital. All existing preferred shareholders — including Accel Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital and DFJ Esprit — participated in the round.
The company will use the new money to extend its global marketshare for chipsets used in high speed mobile broadband devices, such as USB modem sticks and embedded modules for notebooks, netbooks, tablets and other emerging devices. Moreover, after this round, Icera hopes to expand to the smartphone space, as well.
In case you don’t know, Icera develops Adaptive Wireless modem technology, which executes the entire modem in software on a high performance processor. Thus, their technology is update-able without hardware — all it takes is a new firmware version to, for instance, update an HSPA to HSPA+ modem.
At the moment, Icera is focused on 3G (HSPA+, HSPA) and 2G (GSM, GPRS, EDGE) cellular voice and data modem chipsets and firmware, with 4G (LTE) scheduled in the near future.