Panovel Technology Corporation, a wireless technology company based in Shanghai, announced today that it has closed its first round funding from GSR Ventures.

Panovel specializes in developing WiMedia Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless chipsets used in personal mobile and home networks. With the ability to store increasingly larger amounts of songs, and higher resolution pictures and videos on portable devices, there is a need to stream and transfer these rich-media files amongst cameras, players, computers, displays and printers. Panovel with its low-cost, power efficient design will bring the latest wireless innovations to the consumer market allowing video streaming, sharing and transferring of rich-media wirelessly amongst devices in seconds.

WiMedia UWB has already been selected by the USB Implementers Forum and the Bluetooth SIG to be the radio platform for both Wireless USB and the next-generation of Bluetooth. The number of UWB devices in the consumer electronics, mobile and computer market globally could reach close to 1 billion by 2011, according to ABI Research.

"The funding will support our marketing and R&D effort to consolidate our position as a leader in the industry", said JunFeng Wang, Founder and President of Panovel. "Our objective is to be the leader in low power UWB devices for the Wireless PAN (Personal Area Network) sector, which is experiencing explosive growth due to the emerging demand for high speed wireless data transfer and video streaming between a large array of devices."

"The current solutions for short range multi-media wireless connectivity are either too slow or too expensive. We strongly believe that with Panovel's WiMedia UWB solution, the price and performance for high speed WUSB devices will be achieved allowing this to become ubiquitous in portable devices," said Simon Vieira-Ribeiro, of GSR Ventures. "Panovel has assembled a very talented multi-disciplinary team and we look forward to working with them closely in enhancing the consumer wireless portable experience."

"Panovel is another example of emerging technology companies that has a profile of great teams with disruptive technology that address global markets; which is a signature profile of GSR portfolio companies," said Sonny Wu, Managing Director of GSR ventures. "We are delighted in helping entrepreneurs like JunFeng and his founding team partners all with big ambition to build the next generation of global technology companies in China, leveraging world class IP, China cost structure and a fast growing world market in wireless consumer devices."

GSR Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Beijing, China and Menlo Park, CA. GSR primarily focuses on early-stage companies in the semiconductor, wireless, internet, and new energy sectors with substantial operations in China and aspirations to become global technology leaders.