The Carlyle Group and Atlas Venture Agrees to Sale of Orthogon Systems

London - Private equity firms The Carlyle Group and Atlas Venture today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement to sell Orthogon Systems to Motorola, Inc. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Orthogon designs highly available, highly reliable wireless Ethernet bridges that provide point-to-point broadband connections in environments where traditional wireless broadband solutions fail to perform. Orthogon’s products enable enterprises, municipalities, government agencies, schools, and hospitals, as well as internet service providers, and other private and public network operators to cost effectively connect disparate networks with unprecedented ease of installation, performance and reliability. Orthogon has thousands of wireless links installed in hundreds of networks in 53 countries around the world. In addition to meeting commercial success, Orthogon’s products have received several industry accolades, including Network Computing Editor’s Choice Award for Best Fixed Wireless System.

Founded in 2000 as PipingHot Networks and headquartered in Ashburton, England, the company launched its wireless Ethernet bridge products in July 2003 as Orthogon Systems. Since then, the company has achieved year-on-year revenue growth and achieved profitability early on in its development.

Vladimir Lasocki, Director, The Carlyle Group, said, "Orthogon’s success is a testament to the creativity, drive, and entrepreneurial vision of its management team. Founder Nigel King and CEO Phil Bolt have transformed this business from a project to the global benchmark in the broadband wireless industry in less than 5 years. Carlyle is proud to have supported and funded this development. This exit represents a good return for our investors and continues our strong track record of exiting fast-growth companies to trade buyers."

Phil Bolt, CEO, Orthogon Networks said, "This is an excellent step for Orthogon, and we are grateful to Carlyle and Atlas for their support in building the business to this stage. We are excited in furthering our growth and technology leadership as part of Motorola." "

Atlas Venture has been deeply involved with Orthogon Systems, beginning with the founders’ rough ideas on a white board in late 1999, and concluding with its successful acquisition by one of the industry’s foremost equipment makers. By deploying its class-leading technology in an emerging new target market; it has built a profitable and fast growing business, despite the challenging environment in the telecoms downturn in 2002 and 2003," said Graham O’Keeffe, Senior Partner at Atlas Venture. "Atlas Venture firmly believed in the team and technology, and we are proud to have been part of this company every step of the way."

The Carlyle Group first invested in Orthogon through its Carlyle Europe Venture Partners (CEVP) fund in 2000. This exit represents the fourth successful exit from the fund in the past 24 months. CEVP sold Egencia, the online business travel service, in 2004 to IAC/InteractiveCorp, Apama, the real-time analytics software company to Progress Software in April 2005, and Inmedia, the media transmission and broadcast company to Arqiva in July 2005.

Atlas Venture is a leading early-stage international venture capital firm and was a founding investor in Orthogon Systems. The firm has more than $2 billion in capital under management and is currently investing from its seventh fund. Recent events in its technology portfolio include: the acquisition of DataPower by IBM; the acquisition of Moreover Technologies by VeriSign; the acquisition of LiveVault by Iron Mountain; and the listing of GoIndustry on the London AIM Exchange under the symbol GOI.

The Carlyle Group and Atlas Venture were advised by Deutsche Bank and McDermott Will & Emery.