Luminary Micro Closes $25M in Series C Round

-- Luminary Micro (http://www.luminarymicro.com), creator of the award-winning Stellaris family of ARM® Cortex(TM)-M3-based microcontrollers (MCUs), announced today that it closed its Series C funding round for $25 Million (USD). New investor Adams Street Partners of Chicago, Illinois joined existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), EXA Ventures, and ATA Ventures in this round. Tom Berman, Partner with Adams Street Partners, has joined Luminary Micro's Board of Directors.

"We are proud to welcome Adams Street Partners to the Luminary team," said CEO Jim Reinhart. "We thank all of our investors for their commitment to our vision and to our execution of mission. We continue to be fortunate in winning the confidence of investors of the highest stature and financial strength. With over fifty 32-bit Stellaris microcontrollers in production today and with customer adoption booming, this capital will ensure that the company can continue expansion of its efforts on all fronts."

"The market movement to cost-effective open architecture MCUs is in progress," said Tom Berman. "Luminary Micro's Stellaris family of 32-bit ARM-based microcontrollers is a potent catalyst, and Luminary Micro has a fantastic team in place to capitalize on the opportunity. We're excited to join the team."

Since launching the first "ARM for $1" microcontroller in 2006, Luminary Micro has expanded its Stellaris portfolio to over 50 feature-rich microcontrollers, along with an extensive line of evaluation and development kits and quick time-to-market reference designs. With sophisticated options for motion control, energy, real-time networking, and deterministic control applications, Luminary Micro's Stellaris family offers customers the widest range of precisely-compatible MCUs in the industry. Customers seeking to standardize development on a state-of-the-art cost-effective 32-bit architecture are finding the Stellaris family to be a compelling solution.

"The cost of developing embedded software has skyrocketed over the past decade, and the profusion of incompatible, proprietary MCUs has only compounded the problem," said Luminary Micro Chairman and NEA Venture Partner Jimmy Treybig. "The time for standardization is right now, and Luminary Micro's combination of the ARM Cortex-M3 core with market-specific Stellaris peripheral solutions provides companies developing embedded systems with a dramatic competitive and economic advantage. Proprietary MCUs are a millstone around the neck of the embedded industry's innovation."

About Luminary Micro and Stellaris

Luminary Micro, Inc. designs, markets and sells ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontrollers (MCUs). Austin, Texas-based Luminary Micro is the lead partner for the Cortex-M3 processor, delivering the world's first silicon implementation of the Cortex-M3 processor. Luminary Micro's introduction of the award-winning Stellaris® family of products provides 32-bit performance for the same price as current 8- and 16-bit microcontroller designs. With entry-level pricing at $1.00 for an ARM technology-based MCU, Luminary Micro's Stellaris product line allows for standardization that eliminates future architectural upgrades or software tools changes.