ModViz, Inc. Completes $2.8 Million Series A Venture Financing; Funds Accelerate ModViz's Product and Market Development for Virtual Graphics Platform

Business Wire, Sept 1, 2004

BERKELEY, Calif. -- ModViz Inc., a software company developing products to enable high performance 3D visualization on computing clusters today announced it has received $2.8 million in new venture funding. Lead investors for this round are Selby Venture Partners, a leading early-stage venture fund in Silicon Valley, and LMS Capital, the investment arm of London Merchant Securities plc (LON:LMSO), a publicly-traded, leading venture capital and real estate investment company based in the United Kingdom. Additional investors are Atrium Venture Partners, the Halo Fund II and The Angels Forum. Marco DeMiroz, partner of Selby Venture Partners and Scott Potter, a Managing Director of LMS Capital responsible for LMS's North American Venture Capital and Private Equity portfolio, will join the Board of Directors of ModViz. ModViz was originally seed funded by Siemens Technology-To-Business Center.

ModViz's core product Virtual Graphics Platform(TM) (VGP(TM)) provides to customers, independent software vendors, cluster computing manufacturers and application developers a common, standard-based 3D graphics computing platform that delivers supercomputing level visualization with extreme data size and scalability on high-performance clusters of lower-cost computing nodes.

Tom Coull, chief executive officer of ModViz, states, "The strong support from our new investment team is clear validation of our product vision and ability to deliver world-class visual computing solutions on dramatically more affordable compute resources. The demand for high-performance 3D visualization of large data sets on computing platforms that have a very low cost of ownership is becoming increasingly more critical to our enterprise customers. Through a common software platform that is transparent to existing applications, we enable our customers to immediately achieve the tremendous benefits of commodity cluster computing with practically no change in their existing solution and workflow environments."

"ModViz is developing a compelling product portfolio to deliver unsurpassed cost and usability benefits to those industries, such as aerospace, automotive, life sciences, defense and oil & gas, where the demand for high performance visual processing of large data sets is ever increasing. Based on its leading edge proprietary design, ModViz products will not only offer disruptive price and performance advantages over existing solutions but also significantly simplify the maintenance and upgrade of these systems," said DeMiroz.

"LMS Capital has a 20 year history of Venture Capital and Private Equity investing in both technology and non-technology sectors. When we are able to identify an early-stage technology that has tremendous applicability to specific vertical markets where LMS has a long-standing presence, we view this as a sweet spot of our early stage investing strategy. ModViz's Virtual Graphics Platform exemplifies such a technology and we look forward to working with ModViz's management team to help take their compelling product offering into the Oil & Gas market and beyond," said Potter.

About Virtual Graphics Platform(TM) (VGP(TM)):

Virtual Graphics Platform (VGP) is the leading standards-based software that virtualizes 3D graphics intensive applications across clusters of commodity-based computers. VGP enables an extremely high-performance and scalable infrastructure that is significantly lower in cost and easier to maintain or upgrade.

VGP intelligently sub-divides, distributes and manages 3D graphics data while synchronizing, compositing and delivering the resulting images back to the user's application. VGP's management, rendering, composition and display nodes enable customers to dynamically configure their computing cluster for optimal performance while maintaining complete display output flexibility.

About ModViz:

ModViz's software solutions help organizations visualize very complex or extremely large 3D data sets on high-performance computing clusters. We optimize and extend 3D visualization beyond the technical bounds and cost limitations of traditional engineering workstations so our customers can continue to gain insight and make better decisions as their data requirements grow. Our strong commitment to standards plus industry-leading partnerships puts our customers at the forefront of visualization cluster solutions. ModViz is a spinout from Siemens AG and is located in Berkeley, CA. For more information, please see www.modviz.com.

About Selby Venture Partners:

Selby Venture Partners is a leading venture capital fund that invests in early stage companies developing disruptive, next generation technologies in software and fabless components for the information technology, communications and consumer sectors. Selby's investment team actively participates in the growth and success of its portfolio companies by leveraging more than 150 years of combined operational expertise. www.selbyventures.com

About London Merchant Securities:

London Merchant Securities PLC is a leading property, venture and development capital investment company listed on the London Stock Exchange and a member of the FTSE 250. The property portfolio is valued at more than GBP 850 million and contains a blend of offices, based largely in central London, and retail and leisure property across prime UK towns. The venture and development capital arm is valued at more than GBP 190 million and comprises investments in both the US and UK, with a spread of early stage and second round technology investments, development capital and mature company buy-outs.