Wirama, Inc. announced recently that the company has closed a $1 Million Series A round of financing from a prestigious group of experienced technologists. The investing group is led by Silicon Valley veterans, Dr. Steven McCanne and Jerry M. Kennelly. Mr. Kennelly will take a seat on Wirama’s Board of Directors.

Dr. Kannan Ramchandran, a co-founder of Wirama, and a pioneer in wireless infrastructures, explained that the main barrier to widespread RFID adoption is the inability of today’s antenna and reader technology to deliver the required reliability and range at a low cost. “Despite high profile mandates from both government and large enterprise customers, the adoption of RFID has been slow. Wirama’s products provide a robust solution that is simultaneously accurate and cost effective.”

Wirama was co-founded in 2006 by Ben Wild, Dr. Upamanyu Madhow and Dr. Kannan Ramchandran. Mr. Wild was previously founder of Algochip Corporation, a consulting firm specializing in embedded system design for commercial and defense applications. Several of Algochip’s customers include defense giants Northrop Grumman and DRS Technologies. He has over 10 years experience designing systems for wireless communications, laser radar systems and signal processing. Dr. Madhow and Dr. Ramchandran were co-founders of Bytemobile, Inc., a wireless network infrastructure company, whose products are deployed at over 50 wireless carriers worldwide, including Sprint, T-Mobile and Vodafone. Dr. Madhow is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his current research focuses on wireless sensor and communication networks. He is recognized as a pioneer of adaptive interference suppression, space-time communication and optimization of network design for TCP. He is an IEEE Fellow, and is among the top ten most cited researchers in computer science over the period 1993-2003. He holds 7 US patents. Dr. Ramchandran is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research spans the areas of wireless sensor networks, multimedia communications and networking, wavelets and multi-resolution image and signal processing. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, has won several prestigious Best Paper awards for his research, and is considered a pioneer of distributed signal processing and coding for wireless sensor networks, and robust video communications over wireless networks. He holds 6 US patents and is actively sought after as a consultant and technical advisory board member in the wireless and multimedia industry.

“Wirama’s products allow customers to deploy more economical and efficient use of RFID systems in warehouses, stores and loading docks,” said Ben Wild, company president. “This is enabled by a fundamental set of novel, patent-pending innovations that increase range and reliability of RFID systems by essentially eliminating the effects of fading.”

For more information, please visit: www.wirama.com