Quantance Raises $12 Million Series D Funding to Ramp Up Mass Market Production
Quantance Inc. raised $12 million in Series D funding. Investors include TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DoCoMo Capital. The funding will be used to support production of the company's flagship product, the Q845 qBoostâ„¢ ET Power Supply, and planned product innovations and enhancements. The Q845 has been selected for several baseband/transceiver reference designs, and is being ramped to mass market production to support the market shift toward ET as a definitive requirement in 4G/LTE smartphones, tablets, mobile hotspots and other mobile devices. Additionally, Quantance has continued filing core ET patents along with product enhancements, and plans next-generation ET products and tighter power amplifier (PA) integration later this year, including both GaAs and CMOS PAs.
"The high traction our Q845 has gained with chipset and handset providers since mid-2012 is driving our plans to scale for mass market production," said Vikas Vinayak, Quantance's CEO and co-founder. "So many big players have firm plans for deploying ET solutions that we expect ET to be 'table stakes' by the end of next year. To maintain our leadership role in this fast-moving market, we are planning several performance enhancements and seamless operation with all 4G PAs, ranging from legacy PAs designed primarily for older Average Power Tracking (APT) technology to the latest trends in CMOS PAs."
Quantance's patented qBoost ET technology is a unique boosting ET architecture that enables PA efficiency to reach theoretical limits, and at the same time, dramatically increases PA transmit power. This architecture delivers the response time equivalent of a 400MHz switcher for ET systems – making the Q845 more than 100 times faster than any other mobile ET power supply solution available today. This ultra-fast performance, along with a standards-based interface and tiny application footprint, sets the industry standard for performance, size and integration simplicity.
"Quantance is well positioned to win a large portion of this explosive ET market, and will be at the leading edge of ET innovations as it is adopted in LTE platforms starting later this year," said Eric Zimits, managing director at Granite Ventures. "But what excites me most about the company is the potential that Quantance's fast power supply technology has in a number of markets, such as enabling 4G CMOS PAs, applying ET to audio amplifiers and improving the performance of application processors. Quantance will make major announcements in some of these areas within the next year."
