RANOVUS adds $24 million Series B financing, readies product deliveries

Start-up RANOVUS Inc., which focuses on high-speed optical transmission technology for intra- and inter-data center applications, has announced $24 million in Series B funding. The company expects to use the money for additional R&D as well as preparing for delivery of its first round of products, which should happen early next year.

The Ottawa-based company plans to pair quantum dot multi-wavelength laser technology and silicon photonics to support multi-terabit transmission with extremely low power (see "Quantum dot lasers and silicon photonics advance data-center connectivity").

The recent founding round included the investors from Series A (see "RANOVUS hopes to ride quantum dot lasers to data center success") as well as a new investor, Export Development Canada, Canada’s export credit agency. As a result of the round, Jim Orlando, managing director of RANOVUS investor OMERS Ventures, has joined the start-up’s board of directors.

"The additional round of equity and growth capital financing, with participation from all our existing major investors as well as adding new investors, will help accelerate our expansion plan to support product delivery into our global customer base," said Hamid Arabzadeh, RANOVUS’s chairman, president, and CEO, via a press statement. "We’re very pleased with our progress over the past year as we achieved significant technical and commercial milestones of our innovation roadmap to enable scalable multi-terabits per second inter-data center and intra-data center connectivity for our lead customers as we work together with them to build networks for the future."

According to Co-Founder and Chief Marketing and Sales Officer Saied Aramideh, RANOVUS will see deployment of its technology with those lead customers beginning in the first quarter of next year. Formal product announcements should come next March at OFC 2015 and will likely include both transceivers and optical engines.

To prepare, RANOVUS will use part of its new funding to ramp up its production resources, which will included multiple contract manufacturers in Asia-Pacific, Aramideh revealed. The company also is setting up a new development center in Nuremburg, Germany, to complement the existing product development ongoing in the company’s Ottawa facility. RANOVUS also has a marketing applications engineering facility in San Jose.

RANOVUS was founded by former employees of CoreOptics, the coherent transmission company Cisco bought in 2010 (see "Cisco to acquire CoreOptics"). In addition to OMERS Ventures and Export Development Canada, investors include Azure Capital Partners, T-Venture, BDC Venture Capital, and MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund. The company has paired with Mellanox Technologies to form the OpenOptics MSA, which targets 100 Gigabit Ethernet applications at 2 km and above using 1550-nm transmission over singlemode fiber.

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