Cohere Technologies FAQ for Telstra Investment Announcement
Q1.What is Cohere Technologies?
A.Cohere Technologies is a venture-backed start-up company focused on addressing the most pressing problems in wireless communications. The company’s groundbreakingOrthogonal Time Frequency and Space (OTFS™) wireless modulation technology will unlock the full potential of the wireless channel, ushering in a new future of unprecedented capacity. The company was founded in 2011 by a team of successful telecommunications pioneers and is based in Santa Clara, California
Q2.Who are the people behind Cohere Technologies?
A.Cohere Technologies was founded by Shlomo Rakib and Dr. Ronny Hadani.
Shlomo is both a prolific inventor – he has over 50 patents – and a successful serial entrepreneur who has launched multiple high technology companies, including Gainspeed, Novafora and Terayon Communication Systems.
Ronny is an academic with a Ph.D. in mathematics and whose main field of expertise is representation and harmonic analysis with applications to signal processing.
Q3.What industry “problem” is Cohere trying to solve?
A.Consumer and business demand for higher bandwidth wireless services continues to grow quickly, but the maximum bandwidth and throughput of modern wireless networks is constrained by the fundamental issues inherent with wireless. These primarily include signal fadingand multipath (the bouncing of signals) which can dramatically limit throughput and impact reception at the network edge. Trying to overcome these issues with the current approaches is costly, not entirely effective and is keeping carriers from maximizing the growing business opportunity.
Cohere Technologies’OTFS™ modulation scheme is meant to solve these issues. It ensures strong reception anywhere within a coverage area and enables much greater throughput.
Q4.What is OTFS™?
A.OTFS™ is an entirely new wireless multi-dimensional modulation scheme developed by Cohere Technologies. OTFS™overcomes the inherent issues of wireless communication far more effectively than the current TDMA and OFDM modulation schemes used in wireless to dramatically increase bandwidth and throughput.
OTFS™ is a multi-dimensional modulationscheme that completely changes how the wireless channel is seen –from the transmitter to the receiver and everything in between. The signal defraction, reflection and absorption inherent in wireless communication results in signal fading, loss of capacity, and other issues that reduce both the coverage area and lower bandwidth. Unlike TDMA and OFDM, our OTFS™ modulation fully addresses these issues to eliminate fading to ensure excellent signal reception throughout coverage areas while maximizing the throughput.
Q5. Will OTFS™tech reside entirely “in the network” only or will it also require something on the client?
A.As an end-to-end modulation scheme it will have to be incorporated into all transmitting and receiving devices.
Q6. Have you filed for patents? Where are you in the patent process?
A. We are fully protecting our intellectual property through nearly two dozen patents that we have so far filed.
Q7.How soon will you have products?
A.We currently expect to have our first backhaul products sometime during the second half of 2015.
Q8.Who are your customers?
A.We are initially targeting mobile network operators, all of which do a considerable amount of backhauling to support their mobile services. Currently the backhaul equipment they use can is limited to line-of-sight (LOS) operation which makes them subject to various environmental fading phenomena. Thanks to the OTFS technology incorporated into our initial radio products, we can support several more times the maximum throughput of current backhaul solutions, up to as much as 1.6 Gbps.
Q9.Who are Cohere’s investorsand how much money have you raised?
A.Our primary investors are Lightspeed Ventures, Macquarie Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. We are not disclosing how much we have raised in total, but the first close of our Series C round of investment was for $35 million.
Q10.How will you use the money you have raised and are you looking for more capital?
A.The new capital will help us staff up and scale our operations to commercialize our OTFS™ technology, complete our first set of OTFS™ products and bring them to market. While we feel comfortable that the funds we have raised to date are sufficient to accomplish our goals, we do reserve the right to seek additional capital if necessary.
Q11. Are you looking for partners – if so, what kind of partners?
A.We are not actively looking for partners at this time. In the future we may consider partners as we grow and seek to expand our market opportunities.