Saturday, April 23, 2005

Motorola Ventures Invests in Asylum Telecom

Motorola Ventures Invests in Asylum Telecom
Friday April 22, 5:44 am ET

NEW YORK and BASINGSTOKE, England, April 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT - News) today announced the company made a strategic minority investment in Asylum Telecom LLC, a global provider of "turnkey" Internet-based communication solutions. Motorola Ventures, the investment arm of Motorola, Inc. aggressively invests in early stage companies with technologies that help accelerate its vision for Seamless Mobility. Motorola Ventures made the investment in Asylum Telecom in the form of a convertible secured note. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
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Asylum has developed and launched a leading edge Internet communications technology currently serving customers in over 25 countries. Asylum's solutions provide substantial benefits enabling customers to easily enhance their existing communications infrastructure with services that were previously too complex or too expensive.

Asylum's product portfolio includes anytime-anywhere access, voice VPN services, converged GSM/IP mobile, and instant messaging. Via a global network of channel partners, Asylum provides a seamless solution, including full OSS/BSS (Operation and Business Support Systems) -- eliminating traditional integration and deployment delays. Asylum will focus Motorola Venture's investment towards R&D to continue building solutions that will increase communications convenience while driving down end-user cost.

"Our decision to invest in Asylum was driven by their innovative approach to VoIP and their ability to deliver a seamless user experience," said John O'Donohue, managing director of Motorola Ventures, Europe, Middle East and Africa. "This investment will enable the company to explore opportunities that leverage the exploding Internet telephony and video markets and accelerate our overall seamless mobility vision. It is our first venture investment in a company having a significant R&D and support facility in Hungary and the depth of engineering talent has impressed us."

"We are extremely pleased Motorola has invested in Asylum," said Paul Cheng, founder and CEO of Asylum Telecom. "Their investment validates our vision and approach toward providing enterprises and service provider's simple, reliable IP communications services, anytime, anywhere. We look forward to helping enable the seamlessly mobile world that Motorola envisions."

About Asylum Telecom

Asylum Telecom is a global provider of "turnkey" Internet-based communications solutions to Internet Service Providers, consumer brand companies, and enterprises. Via a worldwide network of Channel Partners and System Integrators, Asylum also offers robust corporate communications services that include PBX-integrated Internet telephony, GSM/IP telephony integration solutions, and multinational voice VPN services. Founded in February 2003, the company is a privately-held, venture-capital funded company headquartered in New York with R&D and operational support offices in Budapest, Hungary and Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information, visit http://www.asylumtel.com

About Motorola

Motorola is a Fortune 100 global communications leader that provides seamless mobility products and solutions across broadband, embedded systems and wireless networks. In your home, auto, workplace and all spaces in between, seamless mobility means you can reach the people, things and information you need, anywhere, anytime. Seamless mobility harnesses the power of technology convergence and enables smarter, faster, cost-effective and flexible communication. Motorola had sales of US $31.3 billion in 2004. For more information: http://www.motorola.com

About Motorola Ventures

Motorola Ventures (MV) is the global, strategic venture capital investment arm of Motorola, Inc. MV actively invests at all stages in developing companies of strategic value to Motorola in order to accelerate access to new technologies, new markets and new talent. For more information: http://www.motorola.com/ventures

MOTOROLA and the stylised M Logo are registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.

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Source: Motorola