Californian HD wireless video chip maker, SiBeam, who’s technology is behind the WirelessHD standard, has taken another round of funding, clearly ramping up to begin mass shipments.
The Californian, which cannot really be called a start up because it’s 6 years old, has drawn down another $36.5 million in its fourth round of funding, and although its total funding can’t quite be worked out, because some of those rounds had unspecified amounts in them, it must be well over $100 million and is probably up around $160 million.
The round brought in Foundation Capital as lead and Lux capital and Hatteras Funds. Already on board are strategic investors Best Buy, Panasonic, Samsung, and Cisco as well as US Ventures Partners and New Enterprise Associates .
SiBeam has always attracted a lot of interest from very powerful backers but with these types of names behind it, it has the manufacturing partners and the retail route to market all keenly interested. All its chips have to do is perform in the home and it is a surefire winner.
SiBeam is now pretty much established as the front runner in 60 GHz wireless chipsets for the delivery of HD video around a home. At CES this year it announced that leading US TV manufacturers would be using its chipsets to deliver WirelessHD and it showed existing Panasonic designs. It was almost exactly a year ago that the very first devices with WirelessHD were put on show by LG, while Panasonic previewed a product last Summer. It looks like this funding round is all about ramping up production for the mass market
Best Buy manufactures its own brands of technology products, including the Insignia, Rocketfish, Dynex, Init and Geek Squad brands and recently joined the WirelessHD Consortium, and launched its Rocketfish WirelessHD Adapters which make it very expensive to retrofit this technology at $600 a pair. They are likely priced high due to a strategy of using the technology to drive another generation of devices. Selling a pair of adapters might prevent the sale of a brand new TV system from top to toe, worth several $1,000s.
WirelessHD products were already shown in January on Panasonic, LG, Funai, Toshiba and Philips. Sony is the odd one out and although it has announced support for WirelessHD, it was perhaps distracted by dalliances with WHDI and its chip maker Amimon, which it is now backing away from.
In October SiBeam launched its second generation chipset trying to head off the WiGig Alliance as its clearest competition, a general purpose Wi-Fi class high speed home networking plan, backed by Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, Marvell and Mediatek.
SiBeam said in January that its new chip could cope with 3D HD video streams and supports HDCP 2.0 data protection and can go up to 10 Gbps. It will even handle 4K TV systems (4 times 1080p) and Deep Color (with more bits used on each pixel) at that speed.
‘SiBEAM continues to receive extensive interest from CE and PC manufacturers worldwide that are eager to integrate simple, cost effective and high quality wireless streaming capability into their products,’ said Adam Grosser, General Partner at Foundation Capital. Now that’s interesting because up until now it has never talked about PC vendors being interested in the chipsets, and it may be making a challenge to completely upset the WiGig apple cart here.
SiBeam offers something called the OmniLink60 and the latest version is targeted at A/V receivers, home theater-in-a-box systems, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, media center PCs, and now it says ‘consumer laptops’.