Florham Park, NJ, February 28, 2002 - Xtellus, Inc., has completed its first round of funding for $8M with Alta-Berkeley, AIG-Orion and Israel Seed Partners.

Xtellus develops, manufactures and markets best-in-class dynamic optics components and modules for multiwavelength, reconfigurable optical networking systems. Xtellus products provide wavelength management and optical power control functionality and include components such as reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers.

Xtellus was founded in December 2000 by Dr. Gil Cohen, Dr. Sam (Seong-Woo) Suh and Dr. Yaron Silberberg. Dr. Cohen is Xtellus' President and CEO. Previously Dr. Cohen was VP of Instrumentation at Visionix, a supplier of technology to the ophthalmic industry, and was a Founder and GM of Licom Technologies, a maker of optical communications components, that has since been partially sold. He brings a proven ability to bring new optical products to market, and has multidisciplinary optical business management experience covering international sales and marketing, R&D and technical support.

Dr. Suh is Xtellus' VP Engineering and CTO. He has held key founding stage positions in two optical communications startups, Licom Technologies, and Yafo Networks where he was Head of Optics. Dr. Suh brings extensive research, development, production and management experience in the fiber optics and liquid crystal display industries covering both telecommunications and military applications.

Dr. Yaron Silberberg is Professor of Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and is also Xtellus' Chief Scientist. He has an international reputation for his work on optical devices, nonlinear optics and ultrafast optics, and owns several significant patents related to optical communication devices. Dr. Silberberg spent eleven years at Bellcore (currently Telcordia) in the optical communications section of their Applied Research division, and was made a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 1991. Xtellus is headquartered in Florham Park, New Jersey, and also has an office in Jerusalem, Israel.

For further information please contact Jonathan Homa at 973-410-9330 #113 or via email at jonathan.homa@xtellus.com.