Cisco Systems intends to spend about $320 million for Leaba Semiconductor, a venture-backed fabless networking chip vendor based in Israel.
The acquisition was announced in a blog post by Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investment team. Salvagno said the acquisition would advance Cisco’s innovation strategy. “By combining Leaba’s semiconductor expertise with the Cisco engineering team, we will accelerate our plans for Cisco’s next generation product portfolio and bring new capabilities to the market faster,” Salvagno wrote.
Salvagno described Leaba as “a team with a strong and successful track record of designing leading edge networking semiconductors” to address network infrastructure challenges.
Cisco’s Leaba acquisition would further the accelerating wave of mergers and consolidation in the semiconductor industry, which shows no sign of letting up.
The Leaba acquisition was the second deal announced by Cisco this week. On Tuesday, Cisco (San Jose, Calif.) announced it would acquire Cliqr Technologies Inc., a privately held vendor of application-defined cloud orchestration platforms. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.