Valence Semi Plans Marketing Push; Eyes Future IPO
Officials at upstart Irvine chip maker Valence Semiconductor Inc. are planning a public relations blitz after almost three years in obscurity.
Their biggest salvo: an announcement about the company’s fourth funding round totaling $19.8 million that closed earlier this year and a new round of funding slated to close in the next few weeks.
“We’re looking at officially announcing it about three to four weeks,” said Antony Beswick, vice president in charge of Valence’s marketing. “And in four weeks time our new site will go live. We’re excited.”
Valence’s pending marketing campaign is part of a company strategy to pique the interest of the investment community. Company executives have been touring the country meeting with investment bankers and offering an introduction to the company, which makes chips that process both digital and analog signals for networking, video and wireless devices.
While executives decline to comment on specific plans, Valence has indicated it is looking toward an initial public stock offering, saying it would give the company leverage to make acquisitions.
“The real market opportunities are in multi-product semiconductors,” Beswick said. “An IPO would be driven by our desire to combine our products with those of another company.”
Valence is headquartered across the street from Broadcom Corp., which itself acquired 12 companies last year. And like Broadcom, Valence touts a high number of Ph.Ds in its ranks: about 30. But Valence still is a fraction of the size of its bigger neighbor: it started the year with some 140 employees but has grown to nearly 200 in the past six months.
Valence’s January round of funding brings the total private investment in the company to $35 million since its 1998 founding. Valence started with $3 million raised through private investors and quickly followed up with a $7.75 million investment from Newport Beach-based chip maker Conexant Systems Inc., Lake Forest-based disk drive maker Western Digital Corp. and smaller investors.
Last July, Valence received a $5.25 million investment from Huntsville, Ala.-based networking gear maker Adtran Inc. It followed that up with a $19.8 million investment from a mix of European and U.S. banks and private equity funds.
Along with the new round of funding, Valence executives have been investing large dollar amounts in research and development, showing off new products to potential customers and signing up customers.
Valence, like other chipmakers, hopes to capitalize on the trend toward smaller, better, cheaper, faster semiconductors. The company’s chips house on a single integrated circuit what used to be separate components.
Along with the chips the company makes, Valence boasts that it also produces the software to make its chips run.
In addition to products that enable speedy transmission of data, Valence also plans to make products for Internet telephony, global positioning systems and video applications,markets the company expects to grow in coming years. n
