Sequans Communications today said it has raised $24 million in its second round of financing, which it plans to use to grow the company in the mobile WiMAX market.

The WiMAX system-on-a-chip (SOC) vendor has now raised $33 million since receiving its first $2 million in seed money. But while previous funds were used to fund its research and development work, the current round will go toward growing the company, particularly its sales and marketing operations, said Georges Karam, Sequans’ CEO.

Last week Sequans announced it has begun sampling its new 802.16e SoC to select customers. The CPE chipset integrates the media access layer (MAC) and physical layer onto a single piece of silicon, and while other WiMAX vendors sampled their chipsets earlier, Karam said Sequans has been fine-tuning its own solution to produce a product for very low power consumption, giving it an edge over competitors like Beceem. Though Sequans didn’t specifically name the vendors receiving the samples, it has been working closely with LG Electronics and Airspan.