Columbia Company Gets $20 Million

Columbia based Paratek Microwave received $20 million in venture capital according to a chart accompanying this story by Alejandro Lazo in today’s Washington Post. The funding was provided by a consortium of at least seven venture capital investors during the fourth quarter of 2008.

Paratek was the only Columbia company on the list of 41 firms but Howard County had two other firms on the list as well. Jessup based American Dynamics Flight Systems and Clarksville based U.S. Languages and Cultures Net both received $75,000 from Maryland Technology Development Corp during the same period.

The investment into Paratek comes at a time when overall venture capital investment in the Washington region “fell 20 percent in 2008 as the economic downturn and credit crunch left fewer sources of financing available for such deals,”

Paratek, which “designs and manufactures adaptive RF front-end component solutions for mobile wireless applications”, has been in Columbia since 1998.

So far that’s better news than last week.