Cisco snaps up Israeli chip designer Leaba Semiconductor for $320 million
Cisco said Tuesday it's buying Israeli chip designer Leaba Semiconductor for for $320 million in cash.
In a blog post, Cisco corporate business development VP Rob Salvagno said Leaba will become part of Cisco's core engineering team.
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"Leaba is a team with a strong and successful track record of designing leading edge networking semiconductors that provide innovative solutions to address significant infrastructure challenges," Salvagno said.
Not much is know about Leaba. On its website, the company explains that it's currently in stealth mode, so it's not revealing any products. That said, it's hard to tell exactly what attracted Cisco to the young startup.
According to Israeli news site Ynet.co, Leaba was founded in 2014 by its CEO Eyal Dagan and its CTO Ofer Iny, who sold Dune Networks to Broadcom in 2009 for about $200 million.
Israel has been a hotbed for tech acquisitions in recent years. In January, Sony acquired Israel-based chipmaker Altair Semiconductor for $212 million. Last month, software giant Oracle said that it was buying Israeli virtualization and cloud firm Ravello Systems for $450 million.
As for Cisco, the networking giant has been on a buying spree of its own. Last month the company plopped down $1.4 billion in cash to acquire Internet of Things startup Jasper Technologies.
And just yesterday Cisco announced that it will pay $260 million for cloud orchestration startup CliQr.
It's interesting to note the differences between the two purchases. The CliQr deal is focused around expanding Cisco's offerings around software and cloud computing, whereas Reaba takes Cisco back to its hardware roots.