FREMONT, Calif. - Maxoptix Corp., a technology leader of optical storage solutions, today announced that it has completed a second round of funding totaling more than $18 million. The company has now secured more than $30 million in two rounds of funding. The lead investors for this round of funding include Smart Technology Ventures III SBIC with $4 million, Hunt Ventures L.P. with nearly $1 million, Vahit Yazici with $2.6 million, H.T. Ardinger Jr. with $7 million, and Lafe Holdings Limited with $2 million. Perhaps most significant on the list, said Gary D. Potts, Maxoptix President and CEO, is the investment from Hong Kong-based Lafe Holdings, a development partner with Maxoptix on the new Optical Super Density (OSD(TM)) technology. Lafe is the leading supplier of recording heads for Super DLT tape drives, and is producing the innovative new Far Field Recording head technology for the OSD drives. Further demonstrating Lafe's support for the technology is the fact that Lafe is funding the development of the new optical head technology internally. "The investment community has sent a strong signal of endorsement of the outstanding executive team we have assembled, as well as the technology roadmap we have established with OSD," said Potts. "The investment by Lafe is especially meaningful, as it demonstrates their absolute commitment to Maxoptix and OSD." According to Potts, the new investments will be used to complete the final development phase of OSD technology, which is scheduled for first customer shipments in the third quarter of 2001, more than 18 months ahead of the schedule announced by others for ultra-high capacity optical formats. Maxoptix is the technology leader in the high-performance segment of the optical data storage industry. It currently ships optical drives, libraries and media for data center and networked computing environments. The company's products are installed worldwide for a broad range of data-intensive applications, such as medical imaging, telecommunications, digital audio/video editing and pre-press graphics.