Tamir Fishman & Co. and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) yesterday jointly invested $12 million in Siklu Ltd. This is the two investment houses first investment since announcing their partnership six months ago. Evergreen Venture Partners and Argonaut Ventures also participated in the round.
Siklu CEO Izik Kirshenbaum, CTO Yigal Leiba, systems director Baruch Schwartz, and RS director Elad Dayan founded the company six months ago. Until 2006, Kirshenbaum served as manager of Intel Israel's WiMAX unit, which was based on the acquisition of Envara four years ago. He also commanded an IDF technology unit. ModemArt co-founder Dr. Yossi Kofman invested in Siklu at the seed stage and is a director. Siklu has six employees.
Cellular transmission is an expensive field. The field is the link between dispersed cellular cells, represented by cellular antennas, and regional centers. A variety of technologies currently connect between these points, backed by fiber optic or copper cables, or wireless. One of the bottlenecks of broadband wireless communications is access to the antennas. Siklu is developing very high frequency microwave backhaul technology to solve this problem.
Siklu will try to meet the demand of cellular services providers to provide more bandwidth at low cost. Kirshenbaum said, "The current bottleneck in accessing antennas involves both cost and speed. There is already demand for these technologies." He predicts that the company will have a prototype next year and a product in 2010.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on April 17, 2008
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