Mango DSP, a provider of Digital Signal Processing solutions, has raised $4.5 million in a private placement. Investors include a European venture capital fund, foreign corporations, private investors and shareholders which again invested in the company, such as Danbar Technologies and Ted Arison's venture capital fund. The placement was underwritten by the investment banks Leumi & Company Underwriters, which led the effort, April Investments, and Jerusalem Global. The company is concurrently reviewing a possible IPO on one of Europe's stock exchanges.
Ron Ben Zur, IPO Manager at Leumi & Company Underwriters said, "The success of Mango DSP's capital raising efforts and the rate of growth of its sales will lead it on to a successful IPO in Europe."
Last March Mango DSP, a Jerusalem start-up company, raised $3 million in convertible bonds in two weeks. In 1999 the company achieved total sales of over $2 million, and is expected to double this figure in 2000. Mango DSP has subsidiaries and marketing offices in the US and UK, and distributors in the Far East and Europe.
Mango DSP has developed a new generation software for work in the DSP environment, enabling developers to work in advanced programming environments. This software is to replace the outdated programming environment in which DSP is presently developed. Mango DSP received the ISO 9001 standard seal in 1999. The company is active in the development, production and marketing of software enabling the fast programming of DSP components that form the main components in many products, such as cellular telephones, communications networks, medical imaging, and additional applications. A single DSP processor (and several such processors can be installed in a single computer) can process the huge information flows of images and sounds in real time, and forms the major component in the development of communications markets.
The company employs some 50 people in Israel and worldwide.
Mango DSP CFO Ilan Hadar said, "The success of the recent capital raising endeavor, as well as a series of collaborations with leading companies, are a vote of confidence in our unique DSP products. The present investment will launch us in new communications markets."
Mango DSP was established in 1996 by Mike Berlin, formerly manager of Motorola Israel's engineering department, and Lieut. Col. (Res.) Baruch Peled, formerly director of development programs for the Israeli Air Force and category manager for Scitex.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on July 2, 2000