kSARIA Corp. has raised $20 million in second-round venture funding, led by a new investor, Advent International of Boston, MA, who was joined by all of kSARIA's first-round institutional investors: North Bridge Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, Boulder Ventures Ltd. and Spinner Asset Management, LLC. kSARIA will use its fresh influx of capital to fully develop its family of products and expand its sales and manufacturing infrastructure.
"We're confident that kSARIA is the clear leader in automated assembly equipment for the optical components industry," contends Douglas A. Kingsley, managing director of Advent International. "When the telecom industry rebounds, manufacturers will have to choose between massive hiring and automation. We believe they'll choose automation and, when they do, kSARIA will be well positioned to capitalize on the opportunity."
kSARIA believes it was successful in attracting additional capital now because its standardized, automated systems address a major industry problem: slow and costly, labor-intensive assembly of fiber-optic components and modules. These products are driving the innovation of next-generation, high-bandwidth networks but they are still assembled by manual and semi-manual methods.
kSARIA's first assembly system, the Prima Fiber Pigtail Fabrication System, is in full scale production. kSARIA's second system, the PrestaFiber Prep and Fusion Splicing System, was previewed in October at the Assembly Automation Expo and will be in production in the first quarter of 2002.
For more information about kSARIA (Wilmington, MA), visit the company's Web site at www.kSARIA.com.