There’s another shift at Irvine-based Morpho Technologies Inc.
The company named its second chief executive in a year and said it inked a $10 million round of funding from existing investors.
Morpho has been retooling its strategy during the past year in the hopes of wooing venture investors and boosting revenue.
Its latest move: hiring John Rayfield as chief executive.
About a year ago, Harold Blomquist, a chip industry veteran, replaced company founder Shahriar Sadri as chief executive.
Blomquist wanted to shift Morpho from just licensing its chip designs to making them, too. But the move didn’t win over new venture investors, which the company had been hoping to attract.
Now Morpho has turned to John Rayfield, a former executive with Britain’s ARM Holdings PLC and founder of chip consultant Novelchange Inc.
ARM Holdings designs and licenses chips that let several tasks be done at the same time.
Rayfield’s charge is to pursue the company’s initial strategy of licensing chip designs to companies.
“It’s a much more pragmatic approach,” Rayfield said.
The company didn’t comment about Blomquist’s departure, but a board member did talk about Rayfield taking over.
“We are confident that (Rayfield’s) unique skill set in processor licensing and marketing will escalate Morpho Technology’s ability to map our technology offering to the growing demand for configurable wireless devices,” said Akbar Shokouhis, who represents one of Morpho’s investors, BridgeWest LLC.
Morpho started out as a licensor of designs for a special type of chip called a reconfigurable digital signal processor.
The design allows for a chip’s function to be changed with software, replacing the need for multiple chips. The company says its designs are a cheaper option for customers because changes to a processor can be made using the software instead of having to be redesigned.
The company got its start after a group of University of Califor-nia, Irvine, engineers received a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the Defense Department. The basic design for the company’s chip comes from the one the group submitted to the government.
Smart Technology Ventures and BridgeWest led the latest funding round. Morpho initially has taken $6.5 million of the $10 million round.
The company had raised $15 million in funding prior to the latest round.
Notable technology funding in recent months was raised by another chipmaker, Irvine-based SolarFlare Communications Inc. Intel Corp. is a SolarFlare backer.
SolarFlare raised nearly $50 million in its latest round of venture funding, doubling its total raised. The size of the funding was surprising given the relatively small investments venture investors have been making in other local companies. Many recent investments haven’t broken the $20 million mark.
