It's a preliminary S-1, so we don't yet know how big an offering Cortina would float. The proposed maximum offering price is $100 million.
Cortina, which sells chips for optical networking and Passive Optical Network (PON)s, has always been unprofitable since its 2001 founding, although it claims non-GAAP profitability for 2008 through 2010.
Table 1: Cortina's Numbers ($M)
2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | |
Revenue | |||||
Net Income (Loss), GAAP | |||||
Net Income (Loss), non-GAAP | |||||
Source: Cortina S-1 filing.
* Not listed on the S-1. |
Canaan Partners , DCM - Doll Capital Management , El Dorado Ventures , Institutional Venture Partners , Kodiak Venture Partners and Morgenthaler all stand to make some money off the IPO, as does Cortina's largest shareholder, Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), which has about a 12 percent stake.
Why this matters
What Cortina has in common with NeoPhotonics is that both have been around seemingly forever and finally have the chance to go public. It's a combination of being well established in the market and finding a period with high enough interest in tech IPOs.
With regard to the latter point, investors seem eager to find a way into optical networking, as analyst Andrew Schmitt of Infonetics Research Inc. has been saying for quite a while.
For more
Here's a Cortina timeline, in reverse chronological order, including our 2007 conviction that the company was an IPO possibility.
- Cortina Builds off Acquisitions
- Cortina Goes Home
- Cortina Systems Inc.: Top 10 Private Companies
- Cortina Buys a PON Plan
- Cortina's Comfortable With Intel Inside
- Intel Hands Off to Cortina
— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading
So, who's next?
There certainly seems to be a window here for all these companies we've been following forever to go public (Inphi, NeoPhotonics, Cortina) or strike some other sort of deal (Hatteras/Overture).
Who else? ANDA we've written about. Actelis comes to mind.
Plenty of names on the optical side. Santur especially (they'd strived for an IPO a few years ago).