Celeno Raises $16M Strategic Investment Round

RA’ANANA, Israel, July 2008 - Celeno Communications Inc., a leading provider of semiconductors for multimedia WiFi home networking applications, today announced that it has closed a strategic $16 million Series C investment led by Cisco, intended to help the company to scale up sales and marketing activities and to enhance next generation product development activities. Miven Venture Partners and the company’s previous investors, Greylock Partners and Pitango Venture Capital, also participated in the oversubscribed round. Total investment in the three-year old company now exceeds $30 million.

Celeno’s high-performance, standards-based WiFi System on a Chip enables robust, whole-home multimedia and entertainment distribution over wireless home networks. Celeno’s silicon solution enables applications such as IPTV streaming, multi-room DVR content distribution and marrying the PC network with multiple TV screens - with full home coverage and no new wires. WiFi silicon components for multimedia distribution are integrated in devices such as residential gateways, set top boxes and home routers and are expected to become the centerpiece of the next generation connected home.

Celeno’s unique technology boosts standard WiFi performance to enable distribution of multiple flicker-free HD video streams throughout the house. It effectively achieves improvements of up to 10 times the range and as much as twice the throughput of 802.11n draft 2.0 solutions. Celeno’s partners also benefit from the cost-effective Celeno solution architecture, which uniquely delivers superior performance using any standard 3rd party WiFi client chipset or very low-cost single antenna client designs.

“We are delighted to have Cisco as an investor,” said Gilad Rozen, CEO of Celeno: “Cisco’s expertise in home networking and video distribution brings complementary skills to address service providers’ and consumers’ needs for robust, carrier-grade IP video distribution solutions in the home. We look forward to a fruitful and lasting collaboration with our investment partners.”