Alphion wrests $12.1 M in third round Date:   Thursday , September 01, 2005 Bharat Dave founded Alphion Corporation, a maker of integrated components for photonic regeneration; signal conditioning, wavelength management and performance monitoring wrested $12.1 million in third round venture financing. Led by Tallwood Venture Capital with participation from Goldman Sachs, Narra Venture Capital and ICCP Venture Partners. The Princeton Junction, New Jersey based Alphion will use the fund to expand manufacturing capacity and expansion of sales and marketing efforts. Dave says, “VC interest is driven by our position as the category leader in Photonic Integrated Circuits and subsystems. Our Qlight technology platform is based on breakthroughs in photonic integration and packaging, which has enabled us to manufacture the worlds most sophisticated, monolithically integrated PIC.” Demand for Alphion products is coming from WDM metro and long haul, CATV, and datacom OEMs as well as triple-play services in the emerging Photonic Optical Network markets. Primary application drivers include bit rate and protocol transparent services, wavelength conversion, video-on-demand, and IPTV and the market size is expected to grow from $2.3 billion in 2005 to $4.7 billion in 2008. Alphion, started in 2000, has so far completed funding to the tune of $44 million and has about 25 employees. Dave says though there are no direct competitors right now, competition could come from component or subsystem original equipment manufacturers who will enter this market over the next three to five years.