Monday, January 29, 2007

Winphoria vets to unveil mobile sharing firm Aylus

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

In 2003, the team behind Tewksbury's Winphoria Networks Inc. sold the wireless switch maker to Motorola Inc. for $172 million in one of the most successful exits of that year.

In the coming weeks, Winphoria co-founder Shamim Naqvi will begin unveiling his newest venture, Aylus Networks Inc., and the same investors that backed his previous company are once again along for the ride.

Based in Westford, Aylus has developed a way to share media files across mobile networks, allowing users to view pictures, videos or presentations on their mobile handset while carrying on a conversation simultaneously.

Naqvi began the company in 2005 with $10 million in funding from Paul Ferri at Matrix Partners and Edward Anderson of North Bridge Venture Partners, both of whom were major investors in Winphoria and both of whom sit on the board of Aylus. Naqvi expects to raise another round of funding near the end of the first quarter of this year, though he doesn't expect to include other investors.

Already employing about 60 people, with half in Westford and half in India, Aylus will, for the first time, reveal itself and its product at the upcoming GSM World Congress trade show in Barcelona in February.

"We thought that instead of having a big coming-out party, we would do it gradually," Naqvi said. "We'll do a little at GSM, a little at CTIA and go on from there." CTIA is the annual Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association event in late March.

Public modesty has been a staple for this group. Originally founded in 2000, Winphoria remained silent about its products for two years before announcing its first customer in 2002. Naqvi's partner in Winphoria, Murali Aravamudan, has founded a new company in Andover called Veveo Inc., which raised $14 million in funding from Matrix, North Bridge and other investors in 2005. Little else has been made public about that company, except for its board of directors, which includes Anderson and Ferri.

Aylus' board includes other local heavy hitters, including Randy Battat, CEO of Chelmsford-based Airvana Inc.

According to Naqvi, Aylus has several pilot installments with undisclosed customers running in Southeast Asia, and the technology's first incarnation is ready for the market. However, the technology, in its current version, is more suited for the global system for mobile communications (GSM) and universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), the third-generation version of GSM, which are more prominent in Asia and Europe. In the United States, only Cingular and T-Mobile operate networks under the GSM standard.