The Lod-based (near Tel aviv) Variscite achieved a valuation of $250 million as part of a transaction in which Telsys Ltd. increases its holdings in the company. Telsys has announced that it will acquire 2.31% of Variscite’s shares for approximately $5.78 million. Prior to the transaction, Telsys held 68.4% of Variscite’s shares. The second-largest shareholder in the company is Arledan Technologies, which holds 20.3% of its shares.

During Q3 2020, Variscite’s sales totaled NIS 49.99 million, compared with NIS 42.76 million last year. Telsys reported that the growth stemmed from increased demand for the production of products related to the COVID-19 crisis. To tackle the COVID-19 crisis, Variscite had increased its inventories by NIS 11 million to ensure orders were not delayed due to supply chain difficulties.

Partnership with NXP

Variscite employs approximately 90 employees and is is developing, producing and manufacturing ARM-based System on Modules (SoM) that meet military, industrial and medical standards. Its modules provide the computing core for other products, such as robotics systems, medical devices, industrial systems, etc. It has a strategic partnership with NXP, which gives it initial access to i.MX processors even before they hit the market.

In September this year, Variscite announced a new card based on the i.MX 8M Plus. It is a family of heterogeneous application core processors based on more than one architecture. It includes quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processors, a single-core ARM Cortex-M7 processor for real-time processing applications, a neural network accelerator (Vivante VIP8000), a DSP processor for audio signal processing, and two built-in image signal processors (ISPs).

In the first nine months of 2020, its sales amounted to NIS 148.73 million, compared with sales of NIS 130.42 million in the corresponding period last year. Variscite’s parent company, Telsys, is still battling the consequences of the discontinuation of work vis-à-vis Texas Instruments (TI), which has decided to stop working with most of the distributors in the world and focus mainly on direct sales. In the third quarter of 2020, sales in its distribution segment amounted to NIS 26.5 million, compared with sales of NIS 34.5 million last year. Telsys is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange at a market value of approximately NIS 826 million.