Hyperchip Secures US $67 Million in Third Round of Venture Capital Financing for a Total of US $100 Million; Canada's Largest Funding Package for a Pre-Revenue Company.

Business/Technology Editors

MONTREAL--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 27, 2000

Hyperchip(TM) (www.hyperchip.com), The Petabit Routing Company(TM), announced today that it has secured US $67 million (Cdn $100 million) in its third round of financing, bringing the total amount raised since its founding to US $100 million (Cdn $147 million). Lead investor Optical Capital Group was joined by new investors Altamira, Amerindo, Artemis, Enron Broadband Services (a subsidiary of Enron Corp.), JT Ventures, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Pilgrim Baxter, Putnam, and Van Wagoner. All investors from Hyperchip's previous round, Advent International, Argo Global Capital, Siemens, TechnoCap, and Vertex Technology Fund, also participated in the latest funding. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter acted as lead placement agent for the round, with RBC Dominion Securities as co-agent.

"Hyperchip is well positioned to be the leader in the next-generation of core routers, and Optical Capital Group is excited to invest in this dynamic company," said John Spirtos, Vice Chairman of Optical Capital Group, a Columbia, Md.-based technology accelerator actively engaged in the development of optical networking equipment, components, sub-components and software through a network of partner companies. "Hyperchip's vision of an optically switched core fed by extreme-performance routers to bring massive bandwidth to the Internet is compelling."

Telecommunications market researcher RHK forecasts that Internet backbone traffic will increase by approximately 300 percent per year for the period of 2000-2003. Advances in optical networking are increasing the capacity of a single fiber to multiple terabits per second, while the capacity of each fiber bundle soars toward petabit levels. While these advances will provide the very fast transport links to meet increases in data traffic, the capacities of current switch and router architectures will be inadequate to meet demand. According to RHK "the life span of an Internet backbone router today is often less than one year, after which it is moved to the edge, again for less than a year. It is then decommissioned." RHK projects the North American router and switch market to expand up to $16 billion by 2003.

"With the Internet's exponential growth, Hyperchip is the only company that can seamlessly grow carriers' networks to the petabit per second of aggregate port capacity that will be required to feed the new all-optical networks," said Richard Norman, President and CTO, Hyperchip Inc. "This financial backing from industry leaders reaffirms market need and clearly positions Hyperchip as a cornerstone for the optical network backbone. The money raised in this round will help bring our product to customers' test labs."

Hyperchip Technology

Hyperchip's carrier-class routers are scalable from terabits to petabits per second of aggregate port bandwidth to support exponential growth without forklift upgrades. These extreme-performance network systems are based on Hyperchip's massively parallel semiconductor technology, producing routers that scale to 65,536 high-speed ports to unleash the bandwidth potential of optical fiber. In addition to full routing systems for the WAN, Hyperchip will provide this scalability to leading innovators in local, server and storage area networks through partnerships.

About Hyperchip

Hyperchip's early investors include Siemens Mustang Ventures, Argo Global Capital (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Microcell, etc.), Vertex, Advent (NTT, KPN, Sonera) and TechnoCap. Founded in 1997 after 10 years of patent work and 4 years of proof-of-concept work, Hyperchip has pioneered major advances in key computing and communication technologies. Hyperchip is the leader in petabit scalability for the WAN, and is driving the merger of the world's networks to provide end-to-end, multi-gigabit connections between users, servers and storage, regardless of distance. Hyperchip's technology allows its equipment to scale beyond all vendors in the router market. Competitors include Avici, Juniper, Pluris, IronBridge and Cisco. More information about Hyperchip can be found at www.hyperchip.com. Hyperchip and the Petabit Routing Company are trademarks of Hyperchip Inc. Other trademarks identified in this release are the property of their respective companies.

About the New Investors

Optical Capital Group (www.opticalcapitalgroup.com), based in Columbia, Md., is a technology and optical networking accelerator focused on bringing to market the future of optical networking. Optical Capital Group invests in distinct, but related optical networking companies located in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

With close to $7.6 billion in mutual fund assets under management, Altamira (www.altamira.com) ranks as one of Canada's largest independent providers of mutual funds. Its portfolio includes investments in Nortel Networks, Sierra Networks, Juniper Networks, Sycamore Networks, Ciena, Intel and Oracle.

Since inception, Amerindo Investment Advisors (www.amerindo.com) has exclusively focused its research on identifying emerging technology companies with leading-edge products or services that offer the greatest growth potential and ability to capture a dominant share of the end market. Amerindo's portfolio includes Yahoo!, Broadcom Corp, and Gilead Sciences.

The Artemis Group, led by French entrepreneur Francois Pinault, is a global investment holding company with wide ranging interests. Artemis is the major shareholder of Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, the largest specialized retail company in Europe. Artemis holds a large stake in Bouygues, 100 percent of Christie's as well as interest in insurance and media. Artemis's holdings include many of the leading European eCommerce companies.

Enron Broadband Services is a leading provider of high quality, high bandwidth delivery and application services. The company's business model combines the power of the Enron Intelligent Network, Enron's Broadband Operating System, bandwidth trading and intermediation services, and high-bandwidth applications to fundamentally improve the experience and functionality of the Internet. Enron Broadband Services can be found on the Web at www.enron.net.

JT Venture Partners (www.jtventures.com) is a technology venture capital firm that specializes in telecom, software and Internet infrastructure companies. Their portfolio includes Zaffire, DataCore Software, CrosStor and Empowertel Networks.

Putnam Investments (www.putnaminv.com) is one of the United States' oldest and largest money management firms. Putnam manages $400 billion -- including $100 billion in technology companies such as JDS Uniphase, SDL, Brocade Communications, Advanced Fiber Communications and Metromedia Fiber -- for 13 million individual shareholder accounts and 1,000 institutional clients. Putnam has offices in Boston, London and Tokyo.

Pilgrim Baxter (www.pbhgfunds.com) is a $26 billion money management firm, based in Wayne, Pa., which focuses on investing in fast-growing technology companies and has a strong focus in communications. Its network infrastructure portfolio includes such companies as Extreme Networks, Corvis, Juniper Networks, Brocade Communications and JDS Uniphase.

Van Wagoner Capital Management (www.vanwagoner.com) is based in San Francisco and was founded by Garrett R. Van Wagoner in 1995. The investment team at Van Wagoner Capital Management manages over $4 billion in assets in five mutual funds, separate accounts, and a private limited partnership. Van Wagoner Capital Management has participated in the private equity transactions of over 50 companies since 1996. Its telecom investments include JDS Uniphase, Corvis, Ciena, Sycamore, Juniper, and ONI Systems.