Latest stealth Kleiner company: Spatial Photonics
We published funding details in February of a new Kleiner start-up, Spatial Photonics, as part of our quarterly venture capital survey, mentioning Kleiner Perkins and the $1 million investment during the fourth quarter. It’s clearly trying to stay in stealth mode. Note it’s the only company where Kleiner partner Vinod Khosla is on the board which doesn’t have a link from his bio page. So sleuth Justin Hibbard brings us more details about the year-old San Jose start-up, though his source has a figure that conflicts with ours:
Spatial Photonics, a one-year-old San Jose, Calif. startup, raised an $8 million series A round in February from Kleiner Perkins, Intel Capital, and Middlefield Ventures. The company’s board is stacked with an impressive array of heavy hitters: John Doerr and Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins; Les Vadasz, former head of Intel Capital; and Roger Borovoy, former general counsel at Intel. Josh says the company is “targeting the ‘light engine’ opportunity currently served by Texas Instruments’ digital light processing technology.” Translation: it’s doing something with chips that run flat-screen TVs, overhead projectors, and the like (according to Josh). Founder Shaoher Pan, Ph.D. was formerly at Applied Materials and IBM and has three U.S. patents related to etching in silicon.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
