Folsom high-tech company gets $2M investment
Sacramento Business Journal
May 24, 2006
By
Two local venture-capital companies are investing $2 million into a Folsom start-up developing a business based on wireless computer network research done at UC Davis.
Venture capital firm American River Ventures in Roseville led the first-round investment in SynapSense Corp., contributing $1.25 million. DFJ Frontier of West Sacramento is investing $250,000. An unidentified venture fund is expected to invest $500,000.
SynapSense has a handful of employees and will hire more students and graduate students from the University of California Davis, which owns some licensing on the technology the company is pursuing in mesh-wireless sensor networks.
The company is using technology based on research at the Sensor Network Systems Laboratory at UC Davis, where the SENSES project was led by computer scientist Raju Pandey.
Pandey, an associate professor at Davis for 11 years, will be chief technology officer of SynapSense. The university's SENSES project was funded by National Science Foundation grants. SENSES stands for Software Environment for Networks of Sensors and Embedded Systems.
The chief executive officer is Peter Van Deventer, a 10-year veteran of Intel Corp., where he was director of marketing for its $2.3 billion Flash products group. Prior to that, he was the director of worldwide sales for Intel Centrino mobile technology.
Intel is one of the developers of tiny computer/radio sensor devices.
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