Israeli start-up Mobilitec announced that it had completed its first financing round, raising over $10 million. It is believed the round was held at a company value of $30 million, after money.
Lucent Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of Lucent Technologies (Nasdaq: LU), led the round with a $4 million investment. Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and AIG Orion also participated in the round, investing $3 million each.
In August 2000, Mobilitec raised $2.1 million at the seed stage. AIG Orion led that round, together with SingTel Ventures, the investment company of Singapore Telecom.
Mobilitec is developing a platform for providing applications for Java-enabled mobile devices such as cellular telephones and hand-held organizers. The platform uses a special global standard developed by Sun Microsystems for mobile devices, J2ME, that allows the streaming of dynamic content to the devices on demand.
Mobilitec launched its product in August. Mobilitec president and CEO Ophir Holder told "Globes" that the company had already sold the product in the Asia-Pacific region.
Mobilitec was founded in 2000 by Holder, Yoad Gidron, and Haim Taichholtz. It has 27 employees at its development center in Haifa and marketing branch in New York. The company's chairman is Harel Kodesh, former executive VP at Microsoft, where he was in charge of developing and marketing Microsoft's operating system for mobile devices, Windows CE.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on 22 October 2001