US : Airgo Networks announced closing a private equity investment of $25 million, led by Oak Investment Partners. The funds will be used to initiate volume shipment of its Wi-Fi chips, the most advanced in the industry, in early 2004. Airgo’s chipset is based on the company’s innovative Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology that recently was named by EE Times as “the most influential radio technology of the next few years.”

To date, the company has secured $77 million in funding. All of its previous venture capital investors, Accel Partners, Nokia Venture Partners, OVP and Sevin Rosen Fund, also participated in this round. Bandel Carano, a general partner from Oak Investment Partners has joined the company’s board.

“In a single product generation, Airgo has far surpassed the performance and application capabilities of all other chipset offerings in the wireless LAN and wireless home video categories,” said Bandel Carano, general partner of Oak Investment Partners. “Airgo’s technology delivers dramatically higher Wi-Fi performance at competitive prices. Oak is confident that Airgo MIMO solutions will be the long-term wireless chipset market winners.”

The MIMO Breakthrough
Until now, multipath, the natural distortion of radio waves, has been the bane of radio performance. Airgo’s MIMO technology takes advantage of this natural phenomenon instead of fighting against it, as all other radio technologies have done for the past 70 years. As a result, Airgo’s MIMO products double existing Wi-Fi rates to 108 Mbps per channel, while remaining 100 percent interoperable and backwards compatible with all existing Wi-Fi standards. In head-to-head testing, Airgo MIMO enhanced Wi-Fi also enables customers to have a coverage area that is three to ten times that of competing WLAN chipsets, resulting in an order-of-magnitude increase in performance and coverage.

“Airgo’s innovative technology enables many new wireless video and data applications in homes and businesses,” said Greg Raleigh, president and CEO of Airgo Networks. “Leading consumer electronics and data networking companies are preparing now to bring products incorporating our chipset to market in 2004. We are pleased to see our MIMO enhanced 802.11 product line as the centerpiece of their exciting plans for creating robust wireless multimedia home and business networks.”

About Airgo Networks, Inc.
Airgo Netoworks develops breakthrough technology and Wireless LAN (WLAN) products that enable broad new applications by substantially improving the quality and convenience of the WLAN user experience. Airgo’s solutions provide secure, easy-to-use, standards-compliant WLAN capabilities that work in both the 2.4GHz and 5 GHz bands. Airgo’s products are based on the IEEE 802.11 standards (commonly known as Wi-Fi). The breakthrough wireless technology provides cost-effective performance for the most bandwidth-intensive applications, eliminating the need for wires at home, at work, and in
public places. Founded in November 2000, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA; additional development centers are located in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Breukelen, The Netherlands.

WiMaxcouk , 54 Brunel Avenue, Newport UK NP10 ODN.