Sep. 6–A nascent pickup in the U.S. economy and a run-up in stock prices may be bringing Oregon’s long-dormant venture capital community out of hibernation.
UXComm, a network-management software startup that is moving to Hillsboro, said Friday it had raised $6 million in its first round of venture capital funding.
The local office of OVP Venture Partners and Foundation Capital of Menlo Park, Calif., co-led the deal.
Rob Gowan, a former Intel employee, is stepping in as chief executive of UXComm. He comes to the job after spending two years as an entrepreneur in residence with OVP, where he was studying emerging network technologies, identifying industry trends and evaluating possible investment opportunities for the firm.
UXComm’s software helps clients monitor and automatically allocate resources within blade server networks among networking, storage and computing tasks. So-called blade servers are an increasingly popular computer architecture in data centers. They incorporate physically thin, cool-running and low-power hardware in a single chassis and give network administrators more flexibility to swap out and redeploy hardware based on the demand users place on applications.
Gowan said UXComm is relocating eight developers from California’s Bay Area to the company’s new base in Hillsboro. It plans to use the money to accelerate development of its software and expand its sales and marketing teams. The company is hiring now, and it could reach 20 employees this year, Gowan said.
The company relocated to Oregon, Gowan said, because of the local talent base as well as proximity to Linux development efforts at Intel, IBM and the Open Source Development Lab in Beaverton. The company also will be closer to OVP.
UXComm’s deal, coupled with other signs of activity, adds volume to a dim rumble in the region’s startup scene, which has been subdued since the tech boom collapsed in early 2000.
Last month Kryptiq, a Beaverton software company that targets the health care industry, secured about $4.5 million from two venture-capital firms, including SmartForest Ventures of Portland.
Scott Gibson, an active investor in local firms since leaving Sequent Computers, the company he co-founded, said he’s seeing an upswing in venture deals being financed as well as investors showing interest.
The trend has received a lift from recent stock market surges, he said, which have brought both institutional and early-stage angel investors “out of purgatory.”
“There was very little happening six to 12 months ago; even good deals weren’t getting funded,” Gibson said. “This is a hell of an improvement. Now there’s five or six deals either recently done or in closing.”
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(c) 2003, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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