Antenna-maker SkyCross has secured $23 million in financing led by Investor Growth Capital. This investment caps a successful year for the firm, which reported 65-percent year-over-year revenue growth. The company's performance in 2008 is the latest in a four-year span that has produced over 50-percent growth annually. With this latest investment, SkyCross plans to broaden its geographic reach, gain additional worldwide Tier 1 customers, and enter new markets.
Currently, SkyCross serves a range of market segments including handsets, data cards, Universal Serial Bus (USB) dongles, laptops, access points, and mobile personal-entertainment devices. Its antenna portfolio bundles high performance, small size, and competitive pricing to support any combination of protocols including GSM, CDMA, HSPA, IEEE 802.11a/g/b/n, WiMAX, and LTE. Early last year, SkyCross announced the iMAT technology, which promises to significantly enhance device performance and network capacity in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) or related communications systems using multiple antennas.
Essentially, this disruptive innovation consolidates the performance benefits of multiple antennas into a single antenna by using multiple feed points. Each feed provides high isolation, low correlation, and high per-feed radiation efficiency without the need to design and place multiple antennas in a small space. To design a single antenna with multiple feeds, Skycross realized that different modal excitation of a single radiating structure is possible while maintaining isolation between multiple feeds located on the same structure. As a result, relatively high isolation between the feeds is possible. In addition, the antenna pattern produced by each feed can be sufficiently different to support spatial diversity. Signals transmitted or received between the different feed points are thus independenta requirement for higher-gain diversity systems and high-throughput MIMO communications.
The company's newest investor, Investor Growth Capital, is the wholly owned venture capital arm of Investor AB, which is publicly traded on the Stockholm exchange. Investor AB is the largest listed industrial holding company in Northern Europe. The company was founded in 1916 to continue the Wallenberg family's tradition of financing and building best-in-class companies.