Reliance Venture Asset Management, the corporate venture arm of the Reliance Group, announced a profitable exit from the 4G chipmaker Sequans Communications.
This is the first initial public offering (IPO) on New York Stock Exchange of a company funded with Indian VC. The company is a leading fabless designer, developer and supplier of 4G semiconductor solutions for wireless broadband applications, and is based out of France.
Sequans listed on the New York Stock Exchange on April 18 and celebrated the recent completion of its IPO and its first day of trading.
Reliance Venture invested in Sequans in 2007 along with Tier 1 investors like Alcatel Lucent, Motorola, Societe Generale Asset Management, SwissCom, CDC Enterprises, Add Partners, Cap-Decisif, Kennet Venture Partners, Vision Capital and I-Source Gestion.
“Over the years Sequans has established itself as a clear leader in supplying 4G LTE and WiMAX chips and forging excellent customer relations with leading OEMs and MNOs globally”, said Harshal Shah, CEO, Reliance Venture. It has been a great experience working along with Sequans and we are proud to be associated with them for all these years in leading the 4G revolution globally.
Sequans is Reliance Venture’s first portfolio company to go for an IPO on New York Stock Exchange and the company also expects to see several more investee companies taking a similar route in the near future.
Reliance Venture recently exited Dhama Innovations through a secondary sale and is also in talks for several of its portfolio companies as well. Its recent investments include AllGreen Energy, Gradatim IT Ventures, Tessolve Services, Reverse Logistics Co and Suvidhaa Infoserve in India. In the US, it has made investments in companies
like Stoke, E-Band Communications, Pelago Inc. and Scalable Display Technologies. Reliance Venture is one of the founding investor in Yatra.com, one of India’s most successful travel portals.
Sequans Communications is headquartered in Paris, France. Its listing on the New York Stock Exchange is the first by a French technology company in more than ten years. They currently have more than 45 end customers worldwide, consisting primarily of OEMs and ODMs for smartphones, USB dongles, embedded devices, CPE and basestations.
“We are very proud to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and join ranks with other public companies on the Big Board,” said Georges Karam, CEO of Sequans. I am also very proud of the global Sequans’ team and investors whose hard work has propelled us to this major milestone. Sequans’ objective is to be the dominant supplier of chips for Fixed and Mobile WIMAX. Our relationship with Reliance Venture is of strategic importance to us as Reliance brings us the operator perspective on the deployment of WIMAX in Asia.
Sequans Communications is a 4G chipmaker, supplying LTE and WiMAX chips to equipment manufacturers and mobile operators worldwide. Approximately 90 percent of the 4G chips on the Android OS based phone is supplied by Sequans.
Founded in 2004 to address the WiMAX market, the company expanded in early 2009 to address the LTE market. The company has offices throughout the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and China.
