Hardik Jain had helped build chipsets to improve signals on cell phones through LTE signals and WiFi at Broadcom.
So when he joined the University of Texas to earn his PhD and met Sriram Vishwanath, a Stanford PhD and UT professor who was working on the next generation of mobile and WiFi technologies, he was excited to dig into solutions.
Last year, that work blossomed into a new startup, GenXComm, which has developed a new way to improve broadband internet connections and mobile phone signals. And the co-founders announced Tuesday they have received a $7 million Series A round led by Intel Capital. Also in on the deal were Azure Capital Partners, Bandgap Ventures, Fam Capital Partners, Capital Factory, Lip-Bu Tan, UT Horizon Fund and WS Investment Co.
Jain told me GenXComm plans to add new investors on a second closing in the next couple months. The new money comes atop the $1.3 million seed round the company raised in January this year.
“We’ve tried a lot of times. We’ve failed a lot of times. And ultimately we came up with this architecture.”
Investors are eager to get a stake in the company because it says it has solved one of the most puzzling problems in communications technology. In the past, our modems and the transmitters on the provider's end couldn't simultaneously send and receive information. The power of the signals are simply too high.
"It's like shouting as loud as you can while trying to listen to someone whisper," Jain said.
GenXComm has found a way to cancel out the signal interference, kind of like how Bose noise-cancelling headphones block out a lot of background sounds. And that, in turn, allows more data to flow in both ways, which is called full duplex.
“Full duplex has been a dream technology since wireless was invented," Jain said.
Jain, Vishwanath and their team worked on this problem for four years while at the University of Texas.
“We’ve tried a lot of times. We’ve failed a lot of times," he said. "And ultimately we came up with this architecture.”
The company calls it S-SIX, which is defined as simultaneous self-interference cancellation. It has applications for essentially every internet provider and mobile phone company outside of Google Fiber, which uses different technologies to improve speeds. And that improved data flow is key to emerging technologies, such as 5G mobile connections, IoT devices in the home, advanced gaming and our ever-expanding appetite for video.
GenXComm has about 20 employees now, including full- and part-time workers. Jain said the company plans to double its staff in the next 15-18 months to help build out its product.
