History (1994): Optex Closes $6 Million Financing

Optex Communications (Rockville, MD) announced the closing of a $6 million syndicated financing that will allow the company to complete development and field testing of its first commercial products.

The initial products, the ProServer, a video library server targeted at “information superhighway” applications, are based on the company’s erasable optical memory technology which is protected by 18 issued US patents.

In 1996, the firm plans to introduce the Playser, a consumer set top product that Optex believes will become the ‘interactive VCR’ of the information highway. The technological heart of the Optex products is electron trapping optical memory or ‘Etom’, capable of storing 14GB on a 5.25-inch erasable optical disk with a data transfer rate of 120MB/s. These features allow the ProServer video library server to store 1,000 movies in an area of 2×3 inches and download a video-on-demand movie in 84 seconds.

Ralston H. Coffin, CEO and president, Optex, comments: “Widespread implementation of a cost effective, truly interactive information superhighway requires the introduction of reasonably priced, technically sophisticated video storage products. Optex is uniquely positioned to provide both the store and forward video servers the information highway requires and the consumer interface product needed to download information in seconds and play it back on demand.“

The $6 million financing was the result of an oversubscribed private placement offering of preferred stock. The lead investor in the new financing was the Clariden Bank (Zürich, Switzerland), together with its US affiliate, Clariden Asset Management, Inc. (New York, NY). Other major investors included BEA Associates, Inc. (New York, NY), Ethos Partners (New York, NY) and the experimental physics institute CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). The company’s initial venture capital investor and major shareholder is Gryphon Ventures, a Boston, MA-based venture fund that serves as the external manager of the venture capital activities of Ethyl Corporation (Richmond, VA) .

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠74, published on March 1994.