Wireless company Trapeze raises $30M — stays on the trapeze
Trapeze Networks, the Pleasanton start-up that provides equipment to build WiFi local area networks, has raised $30 million in a fourth round of funding, apparently with the help of Juniper Networks.
This is signficant because Trapeze early last year looked like it had “fallen off the trapeze,” as Battery investor Tom Crotty put it to us.
At the time, Crotty was savoring the acquisition of Airespace, which was sold last year to Cisco for $450 million. A competitor to Trapeze, Airespace returned an early profit for Battery, and enabled Cisco to keep the lead in the so-called WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) sector. The networks are sold to help companies to help them connect all their equipment, from phones to computers. Another company Silicon Valley competitor, Aruba, seemed to be getting more traction, and some say it is now considering going public. VentureWire (sub required) wrote a story about the Juniper investment in Trapeze this morning.
According to that report, Redpoint Ventures, Oak Investment, Motorola and Nortel Networks all participated. Founded in 2002, the company has raised a total of $97.5 million.
The sector has been revived lately with all the action surrounding WiFi, specifically the ability to route phone calls through such networks, including the use of VoIP — and thus saving companies money. Trapeze has been helped by this trend, and has worked with new networking players like DiVitas.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
