2 February 2004 Woburn, MA Lightwave-- Polychromix, a developer of wavelength management products based on diffractive MEMS technology, today announced it has attracted in excess of $8 million in its Series B financing. New investor, Siemens Venture Capital, joined Seed Capital Partners (Softbank) and Vanguard Ventures in bringing the total investment in Polychromix to greater than U.S. $15 million. Additional venture capital investors in this round included Navigator Technology Ventures and Pyramid Technology Ventures.
Polychromix's suite of advanced optical channel-management products, based on its Dynamic Channel Orchestrator (P-DCO) platform, have secured multiple purchase orders and design wins from tier-one customers over the past several months. Polychromix intends to use the additional capital to expand its manufacturing capacity and research and development activities to meet growing market demand. The P-DCO platform allows service providers to dynamically and remotely provision and control optical wavelengths from a network operating center, resulting in considerable operational and capital expense reductions.
"Carriers have made substantial investments in optical fiber capacity over the past few years, and are now looking to strategic vendors such as Polychromix to help convert these investments into revenue and profits," said Jack Gill, general partner from Vanguard Ventures. "Polychromix is succeeding where other optical startups have struggled, in that they have secured design wins with tier-one network equipment vendors. Polychromix is poised to grow because we see evidence that carriers are demanding the channel-management and network flexibility that Polychromix's products provide."
"The Polychromix suite of products gives system houses the functionality required to win current carrier bids, which presents a compelling solution in this competitive space," said Bjoern Christensen, president and chief executive officer of Siemens Venture Capital.
"The P-DCO concentrates on specific optical networking requirements, and in an efficient form factor, provides considerable advantages to both service providers and equipment vendors," said Luis Llovera, investment partner at Siemens Venture Capital. "Dynamic wavelength provisioning is an essential step in supporting new wavelength services, positioning Polychromix as a strategic part of future network growth."
The introduction of the P-DCO in optical networks eliminates the need for costly, labor-intensive truck rolls, and replaces them with key strokes at a remote network operating center. Consequently, service providers that employ a P-DCO-enabled architecture can reduce wavelength-provisioning time from months to minutes and can also provide advanced grooming and revenue-generating wavelength services to end-customers. The P-DCO permits carriers to extract additional profit from their existing infrastructure while seamlessly migrating to future networks.
"Polychromix is committed to delivering cost-effective, advanced technology solutions to our customers. This new investment will fuel our growth and transition Polychromix from an innovative R&D operation to a full-scale manufacturing company capable of meeting our customer's demands and expectations," said Brian Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of Polychromix. "Polychromix is developing products that are directly driven by our customer engagements, and we will continue to work closely with them in providing the wavelength management flexibility that future optical networks will require."