OK Labs Receives Major Venture Capital Investment

OK Labs the developers of OKL4 and OK Linux received a major capital injection of $7.6 million from venture capitalist Chrysalis Ventures and Neo Technology Ventures and Citrix® Systems, Inc. OKL4 one of their product is a market-leading embedded hypervisor, which offers the highest performance combined with strong protection and security features. The above is an addition to the $2.5 Million grant they won last June under the AusIndustry’s competitive “Commercial Ready” program, which awards funds to enterprises that demonstrate the highest potential for innovation and its commercialization.

OK Labs is backed by the largest, independent team of microkernel developers, OK Labs delivers. They are the leading supplier of open source embedded hypervisor and virtualization technology to developers of embedded designs for mobile handsets and other consumer electronic applications.

“As handset OEMs and semiconductor suppliers create the next generation of faster and more capable wireless devices, virtualization will play an increasingly critical role in addressing the key challenges of bill of materials (BOM) cost and meeting security and reliability requirements,” commented Steve Subar, OK Labs CEO. “With this investment, OK Labs is positioned to amplify our unique position as the only embedded virtualization solution shipping on handsets today, becoming a key supplier to the supply chain driving the wireless ecosystem.”

According to John Willmoth, Venture Partner at Chrysalis Ventures and former senior executive at Sprint Nextel, “The opportunity for embedded virtualization is clear – over one billion mobile handsets and hundreds of millions of other connected intelligent devices are sold annually. Recently, we have seen greater emphasis on the operating system and software aspects of mobile devices, as evidenced by the increase in the number and diversity of smartphone devices and applications. OK Labs has proven technology that enables device manufacturers to manage this complexity in a more timely, secure and cost effective manner, and is a great fit for the Chrysalis portfolio of media and communications investments.”

I think this is one of the companies to look-out for in 2009. Has we move more to toward mobile computing we will be seeing more of their application in the devices we use.