Financing to Accelerate Development and Expand Global Sales and Marketing Activities

Burlingame, California, USA and Cambridge, UK – July 12, 2004 – Artimi Inc, a fabless semiconductor company developing Ultra Wideband (UWB) silicon solutions, announced today that it has closed a $14 million Series A funding round. Index Ventures co-led the round with Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners Ltd and investment from Oak Investment Partners. 

Artimi is developing UWB integrated circuits that provide high bandwidth wireless connectivity for consumer electronics, personal computer peripherals and industrial equipment. In a low-cost, single chip solution, Artimi’s patented technology will extend the range and boost the performance of UWB connectivity, making it the UWB silicon of choice for many manufacturers. 

“Artimi has assembled an unparalleled engineering and management team with a proven track record of bringing leading semiconductor products to market”, said Giuseppe Zocco, General Partner at Index Ventures, who joins the board. “Artimi has already demonstrated a complete end-to-end UWB system for streaming video, which is attracting strong customer interest. The company is adding other proprietary features to its products that will greatly expand the applications of their technology.”

“UWB presents a compelling solution for very high data rate, short-range communications that eliminates the need for cables between consumer electronics, personal computers and industrial devices”, stated Hermann Hauser of Amadeus Capital Partners, who also joins the board. “Artimi’s UWB chips will make it possible to easily interconnect flat panel displays, DVD, DVR and other multimedia devices. There are many applications for this technology and long experience of investing in semiconductor businesses leads me to believe that Artimi has a good chance of becoming a leader in the UWB field.”

Artimi participates in standard-setting industry bodies, including 802.15 working groups and the Multi-Band OFDM Alliance (MBOA). Through active participation in the standards process, Artimi expects to provide products that will inter-operate with other standards-compliant UWB devices. 

Artimi Chief Financial Officer and Co-founder Richard Dellabarca added: “We are very fortunate to have the support of such an experienced syndicate of investors. Artimi has made tremendous technical and commercial progress to date. The Series A investment will enable us to deliver new UWB technology to our customers, enabling them to deliver products to market ahead of the competition.“