Occam's Razor

Silicon Labs buys Silembia for 20M$

Silicon Laboratories Inc. has agreed to buy Silembia SA ( Rennes, France), a developer of semiconductor intellectual property for digital television demodulation and channel decoding, for  $20 million.
Founded in 2004 by former employees of Philips, Silembia went on to create the EMB5000 DVB-C digital video decoder core. The Silembia acquisition brings a design team with experience in digital demodulation and system architecture design to Silicon Laboratories ( Austin, Texas)

IBM buys Unicorn

Congratulation to Zvi Schreiber, CEO of Unicorn (meta data integration technology build on semantic web standards), former CEO of Tradeum (one of the best IRR of Reuters Greenhouse investments, sold to VerticalNet in 2000), for building Unicorn for 7 years, and creating an  exit to IBM.

Market heat wave

The current increase in transaction price, and entrepreneur value expectation can be observed in today's VentureOne private equity market metrics. According to VentureOne, Valuations of venture-backed companies for 2005 reached their highest point in four years as sizable acquisitions fueled an increase in the price of later-stage companies.

The median premoney valuation of U.S. start-ups reached $15.2 million, up from $12.5 million a year ago, according to a report released today from VentureOne, a unit of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. In 2001 overall annual median premoney valuations hit $16 million. Later-stage information-technology company valuations rose the most, by almost $8 million over 2004, to $30.3 million.

Within IT, the median largest valuations were $42.8 million for later-stage electronics and $44 million for later-stage semiconductor companies. Among round classes, U.S.premoney valuations increased for all but first rounds, which were relatively flat at $5.4 million, down from $5.6 million a year ago.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the median premoney valuation increased to $4.1 million, the highest since $4.8 million in 2002. The median value of European IT companies increased to EUR3.9 million from EUR3.2 million a year ago.

Are we going to all get burn again ?

Euro consolidation

Interesting new European-centric consolidation player around MySQL

MySQL AB, a Sweden-based developer of an open-source database, has acquired Netfrastructure Inc., a Manchester, Mass.–based provider of server software for building Web-based applications. No financial terms were disclosed.

MySQL has raised significant VC funding from  Institutional Venture Partners, Intel Capital, SAP Ventures, Presidio STX, Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.

Nordic M&A : Spectralink buys Kirk Telecom

SpectraLink (independent provider of mobile voice and messaging applications to businesses) has agreed to buy Kirk Telecom (Danish privately owned manufacturer of wireless applications for businesses in Europe and Asia-Pacific) for $61.3 million (fairly conservative multiples, as i its last fiscal year ended April, 30, 2005, Kirk had revenues of $35.9 million and net income of $2.7 million) .