14 DAY TRIAL // Google Capital has entered a partnership with Lightspeed China Partners to invest $38 million (€29.9 million) in InnoLight Technology Corporation, a high-speed optical transceiver supplier in China.
This is the first time that Google’s venture capital business invests in China, and the second in the whole Asian market.
InnoLight Technology Corporation is based in Suzhou and was created back in 2008. Since then, it has managed to expand to other nations as well, such as Japan, Korea, Russia, North America and several European nations. The fresh stack of money will be used to increase the company’s production capacity in order to tap into the cloud storage industry and become a big competitor in the optical components business.
“InnoLight has experienced dramatic growth during the last three years, nearly doubling revenue every year. We are now a leader in 40Gps optical transceivers and a first mover in 100 Gbps solutions,” said Sheng Liu, the company’s CEO.
The Series C investment will help the company strengthen its technology leadership and expand productive capacity to support the rapid growth of the cloud computing industry.
“InnoLight's technology is uniquely suited for next-generation data centre environments, and its vision and execution have been excellent. As Google Capital's second investment in Asia and first in China, InnoLight illustrates the kind of company and management team we seek to support,” said Gene Frantz, Google Capital general partner.
Google sees potential in InnoLight Google is attracted by the potential that InnoLight’s technology has in regards to the data center infrastructure industry. Considering the number of data centers the Internet giant has and the constant plans to build more or to make the existing ones more efficient, this is an investment that makes sense.
InnoLight Technology Corporations designs, builds and markets high speed optical transceivers that enable rapid bandwidth expansion of Web 2.0 companies.
While the deal is an interesting one for Google, it’s even more controversial given the international context that it comes into. China is quite adamant about keeping its doors closed to western Internet services. Google, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and most recently Instagram, are no longer available for citizens of the country.
As InnoLight tries to make Internet connections faster and to help online companies, the Chinese government is actually working to censor as much of the Internet as possible in order to keep a tight grip on the ideas of the citizens and to fend off any ideas of an uprising of any kind.