VC Profits From VocalData Acquisition

WASHINGTON -- Core Capital Partners, a $170 million venture fund that invests in a broad range of technology companies, announced today it made a healthy profit by exiting its venture investment in VocalData when Tekelec (Nasdaq: TKLC) agreed to acquire the company in an announcement yesterday. Core Capital's investment in the Austin, Texas-based provider of hosted Internet protocol (IP) telephony applications came when the firm joined a third round investment in December 2003.

Core Capital's investment in VocalData is indicative of the venture capital firm's commitment to near term VoIP technologies that fill significant gaps in traditional telecom vendor product lines. Other VoIP-related companies in Core Capital's portfolio that are seeing increasing and substantial market acceptance including sentitO Networks, NexTone and Trinity Convergence. sentitO makes VoIP switching equipment, NexTone is an end-to-end session management product developer and Trinity designs, develops, and markets embedded software solutions for developers of converged network equipment.

"At the time of our investment VocalData had attracted a strong syndicate of key investors, gained a substantial customer base and its technology was well vetted," said Mark Levine, Managing Director at Core Capital Partners. "Core Capital's investment philosophy is to invest both in the idea and the team and when Michael Camp joined VocalData as CEO in 2003, we knew the confluence of these factors would make the company a winner."

Levine thinks the spate of acquisitions, marked by Lucent's purchase of softswitch vendor Telica and Tekelec's previous deals to acquire Santera Systems, Taqua Systems and Steleus, is indicative of a rapidly maturing VoIP market. Core Capital expects the pace of consolidation in the telecommunications industry to continue over the next six to twelve months and believes its portfolio of companies is well positioned for continued success.