As video bogs down the Internet, it never hurts to beef up the infrastructure for moving packets around. That’s what semiconductor design firm Aquantia is doing with its chips, and it explains why the company has been able to raise $25 million in a new round of venture funding.
Aquantia’s chips can process 10-gigabit Ethernet signals. That’s important because corporate data centers are getting overloaded. The newest servers have multiple processors, or cores, in a single machine. They also handle virtualization, or running more than one operating system on a machine, so they can multitask better. With all of that processing happening in the confined spaces of crowded data centers, the wires feeding data into the machines have to get faster. That’s where the 10GBASE-T chips come in. They can pump more data — at a speed of 10 gigabits a second — through the same wires.
The Milpitas, Calif., company has raised its second round from Pinnacle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Greylock Partners. Bill Woodruff, vice president of marketing and business development at Aquantia, confirmed the deal in an interview.
The company has been developing CMOS silicon chips for the past four years. Rival companies Solarflare Communications and Teranetics already have competing 10GBASE-T chips on the market. But Woodruff contends that his company’s single-chip solution will have better low-power benefits than its rivals. Power consumption matters in such chips because customers need to package them in relatively small spaces.
Silicon chips that can do this job are replacing bulky optical equipment that converts data from light to to electrical signals. Aquantia’s chips enable the server companies to put the Ethernet networking technology into standard network interface cards that plug into servers or storage devices. Woodruff said Aquantia’s chips will enable dual-port 10-gigabit Ethernet NICs and 16-port to 24-port aggregation switches.
“This is targeted at the edge of the data center network,” said Woodruff.
Aquantia previously raised $15 million in funding in 2005 from Lightspeed, Greylock, and Venture Tech Alliance, which is a venture capital firm whose limited partner is the chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. To date, with the new round, Aquantia has raised a total of $41 million. The company will further describe its products at the end of April at the Interop show in Las Vegas.
One Comment
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Dave said:
Um, Aquantia announced this round a month ago:
Aquantia Closes $26 M Series B Funding Round
Pinnacle Ventures Leads Round, Joined by Series A Investors
MILPITAS, CA, February 15, 2008—Aquantia, the leading innovator of 10-Gigabit Ethernet solutions, today announced that it has closed its Series B round of financing, bringing in a total of $26 million. The round was led by Pinnacle Ventures. This increases the total amount raised by Aquantia to $41 million. Series A investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Venture Tech Alliance also participated in the round.
“The rapid expansion of 10-Gigabit Ethernet represents a great opportunity for companies that deliver what customers are asking for,” said Ken Pelowski, founder and managing partner at Pinnacle Ventures. “Aquantia understands how important copper interconnect is to the evolution of the data center, and has developed innovative 10GBASE-T PHY solutions that meet those customer requirements.”
“We welcome Pinnacle Ventures as an investor,” said Phil Delansay, president and CEO of Aquantia. “This latest financing provides the resources required for us to bring our first-generation devices to market, a market that is eager to see 10GBASE-T become a reality, and to continue our aggressive development efforts toward meeting our customers’ evolving needs.”
“Aquantia understood the requirements of this market from the outset, and leveraged that understanding to drive their product definition and technology.” said Eric O’Brien, general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We are pleased to continue to support Aquantia as their products deliver on those requirements and enable mass adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the data center.”
About Aquantia
Aquantia is a supplier of 10GBASE-T Ethernet physical layer silicon that enables cost-effective, high-bandwidth connectivity at network edges with familiar RJ45 connectors and twisted-pair copper cabling. Low-power 10GBASE-T PHYs are instrumental in deployment of the converged network, in servers, switches and storage.
Aquantia is an active participant in the Ethernet Alliance as well as IEEE initiatives, and uses its unique expertise to deliver the industry’s most advanced products. Aquantia has strong financial backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, VentureTech Alliance, and Pinnacle Ventures. For more information, please visit http://www.aquantia.com.
Contacts:
Bill Woodruff
Vice President of Marketing
Aquantia Corp.
(408) 228-8300 x202
Michael Schoolnik
Story PR
(415) 674-3816
Michael Schoolnik
Story Public Relations
http://storypr.comDirect: 415-674-3816
Mobile: 415-420-2391
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6:05 am
All About Nortel » Blog Archive » Why Can’t Nortel Buy Something Cool? said:
[...] (and by no means am I advocating that this is an M&A target for Nortel). Aquantia just raised $25-million in venture capital to bolster development of ethernet chips, which process 10-gigabit Ethernet [...]
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Solarflare raises $26 million for networking chips » VentureBeat said:
[...] Foundation Capital, Accel Partners and Amadeus Capital Partners. The round slightly exceeds the amount raised by rival chip company Aquantia, which raised $25 million in [...]