MontaVista Software Reports Strong Revenue Growth and Secures $28 Million in Funding

MontaVista Software, a leading embedded software company, has announced that it has ended its 2001 fiscal year with revenues growing 250 percent over 2000, despite the economic downturn. The company captured more than 250 customer design wins in 2001, including Fortune 100 and Global 500 corporations.

MontaVista's larger customers renewed their annual product subscriptions at rates exceeding 115 percent of their original purchase. The company has also secured approximately $28 million in a third round of funding from venture capital firms like US Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures, RRE Ventures, and WR Hambrecht & Co., and leading technology firms such as IBM, Intel and Sony Corporation. MontaVista established new alliances and expanded strategic relationships with semiconductor vendors including Toshiba, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, ARM, MIPS, Alchemy Semiconductor and Tensilica, and with embedded software suppliers such as Trolltech and IBM. The company also added several Global 500 corporations to its list of customers, including Ericsson and Nokia. MontaVista has grown its sales and marketing force in 2001, opening new offices in Sweden, the Netherlands, Singapore and Hong Kong, and appointing four new vice presidents of marketing, worldwide sales, EMEA sales and Asia Pacific sales.

In April 2001, the company introduced version 2.0 of its flagship product, Hard Hat Linux, becoming the first company to market a product fully based on the newly released Linux 2.4 kernel. MontaVista provides a powerful Java development environment -- VisualAge Micro Edition for MontaVista Linux. The MontaVista High Availability Framework, an open architecture platform, is targeted at telecom equipment manufacturers building fault-resilient systems based on CompactPCI and other industry standards. Customers also benefit from powerful graphics toolkits like MontaVista Graphics, a high-end open source graphics environment, and Qt/Embedded, an industry-leading graphics toolkit. In 2001, MontaVista's real-time preemptible kernel solution won a Linux Journal Editor's Choice Award. The next generation of the company's flagship product will be announced next week, to be called MontaVista Linux, instead of Hard Hat Linux. All other future products will also be renamed to reflect the MontaVista brand.