Reliance Venture Asset Management, the venture arm of the Reliance Group in India, announced its profitable exit from the 4G chipmaker Sequans Communications (News - Alert). This is the first initial public offering on New York Stock Exchange of a company funded with Indian VC.

Based out of France, Sequans Communications is a fabless designer, developer and supplier of 4G semiconductor solutions for wireless broadband applications. Sequans was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on April 18.

“We are very proud to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange and join ranks with other public companies on the Big Board,” said Georges Karam, CEO of Sequans, in a statement.

“Sequans' objective is to be the dominant supplier of chips for Fixed and Mobile WIMAX. Our relationship with Reliance Venture is of strategic importance to us as Reliance brings us the operator perspective on the deployment of WIMAX in Asia,” Karam added.

Reliance Venture invested in Sequans in 2007 along with Tier 1 investors like Alcatel Lucent, Motorola (News - Alert), Societe Generale Asset Management, SwissCom, CDC Enterprises, Add Partners, Cap-Decisif, Kennet Venture Partners, Vision Capital and I-Source Gestion.

“Over the years Sequans has established itself as a clear leader in supplying 4G LTE (News - Alert) and WiMAX chips and forging excellent customer relations with leading OEMs and MNOs globally,” said Harshal Shah, CEO of Reliance Venture.

Reliance Venture’s recent investments include AllGreen Energy, Gradatim IT Ventures, Tessolve Services, Reverse Logistics Co. and Suvidhaa Infoserve in India. In the U.S., it made investments in companies like Stoke (News - Alert), E-Band Communications, Pelago and Scalable Display Technologies.

Recently, Sequans announced it chose Azimuth Systems’ (News - Alert) ACE MX MIMO channel emulator for testing of its LTE and WiMAX chipsets. Azimuth's ACE MX wireless channel emulator provides capabilities required for efficient, automated and repeatable testing of the next generation of wireless, carrier-grade LTE and WiMAX solutions, which employ OFDM and advanced antenna techniques such as MIMO.

Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin