By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

The team behind GenXComm, courtesy photo

GenXComm, a telecommunications startup spun out of the University of Texas at Austin, announced Tuesday it has raised $7 million in funding, led by Intel Capital.

Other investors included Azure Capital Partners, Bandgap Ventures, Capital Factory, FAM Capital Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, UT Horizon Fund and WS Investment Co. The company plans to use the Series A funding for research and development and to hire key staff, said Sriram Vishwanath, GenXComm’s co-founder, and president. He is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UT Austin.

In June, GenXComm announced it had received a seed round of investment of $1.5 million. To date, the company, founded in 2016, has raised $8.5 million. The company is solving the problem of wireless networks that can’t handle a lot of traffic. GenXComm has developed a patent-pending technology called S-SIX that can double the amount of traffic a wireless network can handle.

GenXComm’s technology will improve communications greatly, Vishwanath said. It will increase network performance by up to 30 times in dense environments, he said.

GenXComm, which spun out of a four-year-long research project at UT, has demonstrated its technology works in both cable and wireless applications.

“The explosion of smartphone usage and internet bandwidth is pushing the limits on today’s network architecture and available spectrum,” Vishwanath said in a news release. “GenXComm is unleashing the full potential of the spectrum used for today’s 5G mobile, Wi-Fi and cable networks – by allowing channels to be stacked with no empty spectrum between them, thereby generating new applications, revenue streams, and business models for telecom operators and the Industry 4.0.”

In a telephone interview, Vishwanath said the company now has 20 employees and it expects to add up to 15 more by next year, primarily engineers. Its headquarters are in an old house at 1604 San Antonio, a few blocks south of the UT campus. It also plans to open an office in California.

GenXComm is working with the largest telecom players in the world to test its technology, Vishwanath said. At this time, he cannot name the companies, he said. The company will be doing private demos of its technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month, Vishwanath said.

“Full duplex technology has the potential to have a tremendous impact in a number of areas that are important to Intel, including Wi-Fi, Broadband Access, and 5G,” Dan Artusi, vice president, and general manager, Connected Home Division, Intel, said in a news release. “GenXComm’s unique approach to solving the full duplex problem has the potential to significantly increase the speed and capacity of these networks. Given the large increases in the amount of data moving across different networks, technologies such as those pioneered by GenXComm will become increasingly important in the future.”