Newport Opticom Making Plans to Unveil Products
By ANDREW SIMONS
Quiet Newport Beach-based startup Newport Opticom Inc. plans to make several product announcements in June, according to a company official.
“We’re going to be telling people more about what we’re doing in the next couple of months,” said Paul Mukai, senior vice president of marketing at Newport Opticom. “We just need to decide which product we’re going to be releasing to the market.”
The company, which makes fiber-optic gear, has been silent on its progress since landing $7 million in funding in July. That investment was the first in Orange County for Sienna Ventures’ Southern California office, started by former Apple Computer Inc. chief executive Gil Amelio.
Sienna led that round, which also included an investment from the Irvine office of InveStar Capital Inc. Sienna has invested in Redwood City-based OpenWave Systems Inc., formerly Phone.com, Irvine-based Autobytel Inc. and Norwalk, Conn.-based Priceline.com.
For the past few months, Newport Opticom’s staff has been toiling away in their small building, a block from Newport Beach’s Conexant Systems Inc. The company says its engineers have been working on a fiber-optic switch, a device that filters and forwards data along a network. Newport Opticom’s switch operates solely through the use of light wave signals, while most current switches require electrical conversions. The company says its fiber-optic switch will be smaller, more flexible and more cost-efficient.
The company is sending prototypes to “all the big” networking gear makers,companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Nortel Networks Corp. and 3Com Corp., Mukai said. Newport Opticom hopes eventually to land these companies as customers. Newport Opticom officials say the feedback from these tests will help it decide which products and customers it will unveil in the coming months.
Newport Opticom is part of a growing list of OC fiber-optic startups. The list also includes VSK Photonics Inc., an Irvine maker of optical networking components. The company is putting the finishing touches on a wafer fabrication facility in Lake Forest.
But with only one $7 million funding round under its belt, Newport Opticom says it has forgone such expensive pursuits.
“A lot of these companies are building their own fabs,” Mukai said. “We’re not going to do that.”
The company has found ways to run lean. Though Newport Opticom’s work requires a lot of engineering muscle, the company has kept a lid on hiring.
“When we started out, we had a plan that said we would staff what we need,” Mukai said. “All these other companies are under cash pressure, and we’re just not going to do that.”
Several venture capital firms have contacted Newport Opticom, but the company has passed on the offers, said Mukai, because Newport Opticom is not looking for new funding yet.
It seems Newport Opticom won’t have much of a problem landing more money. As local venture capitalists tell it, the failure of Internet businesses points out the obvious: there just aren’t enough pipes to make serious money selling over the Internet. They say investments need to go to the companies that make the pipes,or speed the flow of data over them.
