Chipmaker Raises $8 Million, Moves From Bay Area to OC
By ANDREW SIMONS
A newly funded Bay area chip startup has moved to Orange County.
ClariPhy Communications Inc. recently moved into temporary executive offices in Newport Beach while the company looks for a permanent headquarters.
The company relocated from Santa Clara to be among the county’s contingent of chipmakers, including Broadcom Corp. and Microsemi Corp., both of Irvine.
ClariPhy, which recently raised $8 million in a first round of venture capital funding, plans to make communications chips. Palo Alto venture firms Norwest Venture Capital and Allegis LLC led ClariPhy’s funding.
The company considered staying in Silicon Valley and looked at other areas before deciding to move to Orange County, said Paul Voois, chief executive of ClariPhy.
“We really liked the venture community and the business community down there,” he said.
Voois is credentialed. He has a master’s and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University and holds 10 U.S. patents. He formerly was chief executive of 8×8 Inc., another Silicon Valley startup previously known as Netergy Networks Inc.
Voois made headlines in 2001 after resigning from Netergy. He and a group of engineers left the company in protest of a move to sell the company’s software operations, which eventually became the core Internet telephony business of 8×8.
ClariPhy plans to make a chip for high-speed optical networking devices. The chip could let network operators more easily upgrade their systems and move data faster across older networks.
The company’s chip would allow for data to flow over networks at 10 gigabytes per second. Broadcom recently came out with a similar networking chip.
Like Broadcom and others, ClariPhy plans to design its chips and contract out for their production.
ClariPhy has several potential customers, though Voois declined to name any. The company currently employs about 12 people.
ClariPhy joins other startups that have raised money recently.
Among them: Irvine chip designer TransDimension Inc., which in July raised $18 million in a new round of venture funding.
