ZeroG Wireless secures $17 Million in series B funding
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Bangalore: ZeroG Wireless, a company developing low-power Wi-Fi chips, has secured $17 million in series B financing as it prepares its products for release. The round led by new investor Battery Ventures saw participations from existing investors Greylock Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures. This round brings ZeroG's total to $30 million, said John Cummins, the company's Chief Executive. ZeroG's low-power chips are designed to greatly increase the range of devices that are connected to the Internet by taking advantage of the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure. These include portable medical devices, home and building controls, and sensor networks. Its chips have been designed in a way that they can be easily implemented into almost any kind of product. "Once you give designers that capability, they will come up with things that we did not even envision," Cummins said. The market for microcontrollers - small processors that operate a range of electronic devices from thermostats to bathroom scales - is a multi-billion dollar market that ZeroG Wireless is well positioned to break into as its chips are low power and easy to integrate, said Alex Benik, a principal with Battery Ventures. The ease of integration is especially necessary for designers that are not used to incorporating network technology into their products, Benik said. ZeroG was founded by Tom Lee, a professor at Stanford University and a co-founder of Matrix Semiconductor, which raised $147 million in capital before being acquired by SanDisk for about $250 million in 2005.

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