MiniStor Peripherals Completes Third Round Financing
SAN JOSE, Calif. — July 26, 1993 — MiniStor Peripherals Corp., a premier supplier of high capacity, very rugged, small form factor disk drives, Monday announced it has completed its third round of venture capital financing raising $14.7 million.
MiniStor's total equity capital to date of $29 million consists entirely of equity investments. All but one investor that participated in this round of financing were also investors in the company's first and second rounds of financing. These investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Grace Horn Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Philadelphia Ventures, and New York Life Insurance Co. The new investor added was Berkeley International Capital Corp.
"We are pleased not only to have the continued support of our first and second round investors, but also to have garnered interest from new investors," said Jim Miller, MiniStor's president and chief executive officer.
"This financing represents the confidence that our investors have in the sub-miniature disk drive market and in MiniStor's products, management and strategic direction."
MiniStor's third round of financing will allow the company to ramp-up manufacturing to meet the volumes required by recently signed OEM agreements, such as the one from EO Inc., Mountain View, Calif.
In March 1992, MiniStor introduced the MiniPORT Series, a family of four 1.8-inch hard disk drives that offered capacities of up to 64 megabytes (MB), the first Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA)-compatible removable interface, the lowest vertical height, and the most rugged hard drive storage solution in its class/form factor.
In January 1993, the company announced increased data storage capacities and shock resistance enhancements to their family of drives. The new drives, called the MiniPORT 42 and MiniPORT 85, featured data storage capacities of 42 and 85 MB and the industry's highest operating and non-operating shock resistance – 200 g's.
MiniStor was the first to ship a fully functional 1.8-inch PCMCIA hard drive. While other 1.8-inch drive makers claim to have PCMCIA-compatible drives, most are only offering a dedicated PCMCIA connector through an IDE interface which operates only in the I/O mode with custom software drivers. MiniStor's fully functional PCMCIA drives feature resident PCMCIA controllers with attribute memory that allow the PCMCIA slot to accept other devices without separate software drivers and eliminate the possibility of inadvertent data loss.
MiniStor Peripherals Corp., founded in 1991, is a designer and manufacturer of high capacity, very rugged, low cost, small form factor data storage solutions for portable and mobile battery-powered personal computers. MiniStor Peripherals is headquartered at 2801 Orchard Parkway, San Jose, CA, with manufacturing facilities in Singapore. Note to Editors: Product and company names used herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
CONTACT:
MiniStor Peripherals Corp., San Jose
Jim Miller, 408/943-0165
Walt & Sommerhauser Communications Inc.
Paige Burgess, 408/496-0900