Zinwave Raises $10 Million

Zinwave, a UK-based provider of active wideband in-building coverage solutions, has raised $10 million in Series B funding. SEB Venture Capital led the round, and was joined by return backers Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity Partners.

PRESS RELEASE

Zinwave, a pioneer and leader in next generation in-building cellular and wireless technology, today announced it has been successful in raising $10m in B Round funding to support its aggressive growth strategy and global market expansion plans. The investment comes hot on the heels of the launch of the Zinwave 3000, a unique wideband active distributed antenna system (DAS), at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month and will enable Zinwave to continue its product innovation and strengthen its existing mobile operator and sales channel relationships throughout the US, Europe, and into the rest of EMEA and Asia. This latest round was led by SEB Venture Capital as well as attracting further funding from existing investors Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity partners. The company was advised by GP Bullhound.

The market for in-building wireless coverage is predicted to continue to grow exponentially over the next few years fuelled by emerging technologies and services including 3G; UMTS; CDMA2000; WiMAX; TETRA; LMR; RFID; Telemetry, and DVB-H. Accommodating the variety of today‟s services and dealing with the certainty of future change demands a single unified in-building wireless infrastructure that can deliver multiple services, system scalability and flexible connectivity. It also needs to be able to accommodate future growth and deliver all of this capability at competitive price points. The Zinwave Active Wideband solution has been developed to overcome these challenges.

“Everyone hates being out of wireless touch when in-doors or underground,” commented James Raby, Investment Manager at SEB Venture Capital. “More and more wireless services and network providers are offering greater connectivity to consumers across new pieces of spectrum, a trend we predict will only accelerate. Zinwave leads the way in providing price competitive solutions today that will further enable building owners to ensure the future availability of all these services while also removing their concerns about the risks of future compatibility and capital. We are pleased to be able to support its continued product range growth and sales expansion into the largest US and Asian markets with this new fundraising.”

Commenting on the funding, Jonathan Paget, CEO of Zinwave, said, “This latest investment is a real testament to our strong technology vision, product innovation and market development to date. With this funding in place we now have the momentum to capitalise on our existing sales efforts in Europe and to really bolster our presence in the US where we‟ve seen early successes recruiting sales channels and securing customer trials. With 60-70 percent of existing mobile device usage taking place within buildings and the impact of new technologies such as WiMAX driving even more mobile applications such as data and video, we see the in-building wireless market as a huge opportunity and we have the technology and solutions to capitalise on this.”

About SEB Venture Capital
SEB Venture Capital was established in 1995. With an evergreen fund of approximately 270 million Euros, the fund has currently 41 investments in the technology and healthcare sectors, and has achieved 34 successful exits since inception. With an historical focus on Nordic markets, SEB VC opened a London office in 2007 to identify investments in among other areas, the media-tech and wireless sectors.

About Zinwave
Zinwave is a company at the forefront of wireless technology development, pioneering a new approach to in-building unified wireless infrastructure. With unique patented technologies drawn from world-leading research groups at Cambridge University and University College London, Zinwave was founded in 2002 and is today operated by a seasoned management team with extensive experience of international telecoms markets. The company develops Wideband Distributed Antenna Systems based on Multi-Mode or Single Mode fibre-optic cables that address the challenges of providing continuous radio coverage inside buildings.