It’s Irvine’s high-tech marriage of wireless and wire.
Chip startup Mobix Labs Inc., which focuses on next-generation 5G wireless communications, said it will acquire Cosemi Technologies Inc., a company that specializes in high-speed optical cables.
The expanded company will give Orange County an extra boost in the highly competitive 5G market, which promises transmission speeds far higher than today’s communications.
Cosemi designs and develops high-volume, high-performance active optical cables for infrastructures, enabling extra-fast transmission of the rapidly increasing amounts of data worldwide.
Mobix Labs, which was formed just last year, is backed by some OC tech heavy hitters, including board chairman Jim “Jimmy P” Peterson.
“We combine both wire and wireless together,” said Nguyen Nguyen, the Cosemi founder and now the Mobix chief strategy officer. Nguyen has said while the term cable is used for his company’s products, they contain a highly sophisticated “sub-system” for transmission signals.
Terms and financial details of the transaction announced July 15 were undisclosed.
Global Footprint
“Cosemi as a company has kind of a global footprint,” said Nguyen, who holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This immediately helps Mobix also to expand to a much wider reach.”
The acquisition will add offices in San Jose, Phoenix, Korea, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
Nguyen said in April that Cosemi’s revenue for pandemic-marked 2020 came in at less than $5 million, an amount similar to 2019, while it showed a pickup toward the end of last year.
Cosemi’s innovations provide delay-free connectivity to a wide range of applications, including home entertainment, gaming, AR/VR, video conferencing, mobile devices and monitors, among others.
“The idea is to move a lot of data much faster than we’re moving data today. That’s on the wireless side,” said Mobix Labs CEO Fabian Battaglia in a joint interview with Nguyen with the Business Journal on July 15. “On the interconnect side, what the Cosemi products allow us to do, is then to be able to transfer that data to wherever the data is heading.”
He said the closing of the acquisition will take place within 60 days. Nguyen has also joined the board of Mobix Labs, which is officially known as a “fabless RF (radio frequency) component company” in the 5G millimeter wave market.
Mobix came out of stealth mode in February, when it announced it had raised $10 million in a new round of funding to bring the company’s total financing to $12.5 million.
Revenue Ramp
Mobix Labs booked and shipped its first order last quarter, according to Battaglia. He expects the second half of this year to be the “beginning of our revenue ramp.” He emphasized that Cosemi is an “ongoing business” with a “nice revenue stream.”
Cosemi is “right down the street” from the Mobix offices at 15420 Laguna Canyon Road in Irvine, according to the Mobix CEO.
“I would suspect that we’ll integrate it into what is now Mobix Labs headquarters here in Irvine.”
The combined company will have about 75 employees, Battaglia said.
Battaglia said the combination allows the companies “to bring our innovations to a wide variety of 5G use cases, from autonomous driving to advanced robotics and everything in between.”
Mobix Labs board chairman Peterson, who previously ran Aliso Viejo chipmaker Microsemi, said the Cosemi announcement “is the first of many more that will transform Mobix Labs into a household name.”
Peterson told the Business Journal the purchase is “good for Orange County.”
With speeds up to 10 times faster and capacity up to 100 times that of existing 4G LTE networks, 5G represents the future of wireless communications, where the full capabilities of new technologies can be unlocked, Mobix Labs says on its website.
Mobix had eight job openings posted as of July 20.
