Sagem goes Purple

French handset maker and software developer Sagem has been bought up by private equity firm, Sofinnova Partners, the company revealed late last week.

As part of the deal the software side of the Sagem business will be rolled in with that of Purple Labs, which only last month announced the $32m acquisition of the Openwave mobile browser business.

French technology group Safran sold Sagem to equity firm Sofinnova, an investor in Purple.

Sagem provides a range of white label handsets to operators such as Vodafone and Orange and vendor Sony Ericsson. Under the deal, Purple Labs, which plays in the mobile Linux space, will provide Sagem with all of the application software for its products, and all of the software for its future 3G Linux devices based on LiMo Foundation requirements.