With EPOS Purchase, Qualcomm Reveals Growing Presence in Israel

Brian Sagi of San Diego’s Cerian Technology Ventures has pulled together a few disparate threads of mobile technology news that offer some interesting insights about recent initiatives by Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the wireless technology giant.

Cerian provides a variety of services in technology-based transactions. Sagi says his firm was hired to serve as a strategic M&A advisor for EPOS Development, an Israeli startup with technology that Qualcomm acquired a few weeks ago. Cerian’s work is usually confidential, but Sagi says EPOS allowed him to talk about his firm’s involvement in the Qualcomm deal. He describes the EPOS digital ultrasound technology as “super interesting, with the potential to make a big impact in mobile applications.”

Cerian Technology Ventures CEO Brian Sagi
Brian Sagi

Sagi, who got two engineering degrees at Israel’s Technion before moving to San Diego, points out that EPOS is Qualcomm’s third M&A deal in Israel over the past two years—and he says the wireless giant is scouting for more acquisitions there.

Qualcomm acquired Ra’anana-based DesignArt Networks for $140 million about four months ago. DesignArt, which was consolidated with Qualcomm’s Atheros business, specializes in small cell modem and system-on-a-chip designs for heterogeneous networks and high-speed wireless backhaul infrastructure. It’s an area that has been emerging recently as a key technology focus at Qualcomm.

In 2010, Qualcomm paid an estimated $60 million to $80 million to buy San Francisco-based iSkoot, which was founded in Beit Shemesh in 2005 to develop voice-over-Internet software and related technologies for mobile phones. From its partnership with Skype, iSkoot has expanded its platform to extend the reach of other Internet-based services into mobile handsets.

A few of the EPOS team members are planning to move from Hod Hasharon, where the company is based, to San Diego. But Sagi said most of the startup’s 30 employees would continue to work in Israel. Qualcomm operates an advanced wireless communications R&D center in Haifa that founder Irwin Jacobs established almost

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.