> Cupertino, CA -- July 30, 2007 -- Xoomsys, Inc., a Silicon Valley company
> pioneering scalable distributed processing for circuit simulation, today
> welcomed EDA veteran Penny Herscher as an advisor to the company as it
> prepares for wide deployment of its breakthrough solution.


From: [ Mr. Coffee ]

Hi John,

I've heard that Raul's Xoomsys has gone belly up.

They had one sizeable customer, Elpida.  Their distributed SPICE technology
required deep hooks into a SPICE engine and Elpida had their own and was
willing to work with them.  Its tricky technology to adopt to all different
SPICE engines and it's not clear whether Synopsys nor Cadence ever wanted
to support Xoomsys (besides any technical issues). 

Xoomsys was started by Sunil Patel (technical guy - this was his technology)
and Anjaneya Thakar (business guy and orginal founding CEO) and two more
people who got it going were Buno Pati (ex-Numerical Technologies CEO) and
Naren Gupta (founder Integrated Systems (ISI) and Chairman WindRiver after
WindRiver acquired ISI).  All of them invested in the company.

Buno helped raise the initial $8M by promising the VCs the sun and the moon.

The VCs hired Raul Campasano about 2 years ago to take the company to the
next level, but Raul really had no start-up experience.  He did help raise
another $7-$8M (making a total $15-$16M).  Although Penny Hersher joined
not too soon after, so she might have been a requirement for the funding.

In my opinion, the VCs did not recognize the real issue was not lack of
management, but a combination technology and marketing risk.

Word is the VCs are looking to Anjaneya Thakar (founding CEO) and not Raul
to wrap up the company (without going through bankruptcy, etc., as they
still have some money in the bank to settles with any creditors).  Looks
like last day for the management team was May 31 except for Anjaneya who
stays on to wrap up things.  All the employees have already been let go.
 
They did aggressively go after Synopsys, Cadence (longest courtship) and
Magma to be acquired.  None of them (for their own reasons) were willing
to even do a bare bones asset purchase.
 
Xoomsys looks like another story of misguided VC expectations and an over
ambitious EDA start-up team promising the moon to be able to raise money.

Please keep me anon.

    - [ Mr. Coffee ]


  Editor's Note: Raul Campasano was the CTO of Synopsys before he very
  surprizingly left to become the CEO of Xoomsys back in 2007.  - John