Chip maker Amalfi gets $24M funding for cellphone guts
You may be holding an Amalfi product to your head right now. The company designs CMOS power amplifiers, an integral part of any mobile phone. But Amalfi Semiconductor can’t name its customers, not to me nor to anyone else.
Battery Ventures led this round of funding, Amalfi’s third, followed by unnamed “existing investors.” DCM, Globespan Capital Partners and Trinity Ventures also participated. Battery Ventures partner Ken Lawler has joined Amalfi’s board.
I couldn’t get a meeting by press time, but an Amalfi spokeswoman told me that Amalfi sees the unwired Third World as an emerging growth market for phones built with Amalfi products inside them.
That’s very different from the smartphone-only mindset of American app developers. In most of the rest of the world, Nokia outsells everybody, so you can guess where Amalfi wants its chips to be. Given that Amalfi’s home page is fronted by a photo of a BlackBerry, you can guess where they already are.
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.