Internet Photonics Inc. today announced it has closed its third round of venture financing for $31 million with new investors ComVentures and TeleSoft Partners. Previous investors Sprout Group and New Venture Partners LLC also participated.
As a result of the financing, Cliff Higgerson, general partner and co-founder of ComVentures, will join Internet Photonics' Board of Directors.
To date, Internet Photonics has raised $63 million since its inception in October of 2000. The new funding will be used for increased sales, marketing, and customer support activities, as the company expands its domestic and global market presence and gears up for projected near-term customer shipments of its products for the service provider and cable operator markets. Internet Photonics expects to become cash flow positive in 2003.
Internet Photonics delivers end-to-end managed Optical Ethernet transport solutions with carrier-grade SONET-like Operations, Administration, Management, and Provisioning (OAM&P). According to the company, these solutions allow established carriers to overcome current capital constraints and overcome regulatory barriers while deploying profitable, managed Optical Ethernet private line and access services for enterprise customers. Internet Photonics is also deploying its solution to allow Cable Multiple System Operators (MSOs) to capitalize on the benefits of Optical Ethernet for fast delivery of new, profitable services over their existing digital cable infrastructure, while reducing capital investment and ongoing operating expenses.
According to a report by Morgan Stanley, Gigabit Ethernet is making significant inroads into the metro market as an access technology. All four ILECs currently have metro Ethernet initiatives and are projected to make significant investment in this area over the next five years. Morgan Stanley estimates that by 2004, all service providers will support Ethernet in the metro, and by 2005 nearly 40% of high-speed WAN data services will run over Gigabit Ethernet services.
"Internet Photonics is one of the few companies positioned to capitalize on the huge potential of metro Optical Ethernet," contends Rick Schafer, senior analyst for CIBC World Markets. "It has a unique value proposition for today's capital-constrained environment that allows established carriers to immediately generate new revenue out of existing network infrastructure by selectively deploying only where there is established customer demand. And because this success-based model is an evolutionary approach that works within a carrier's existing operational model with virtually no impact to the capital budget, the risk in offering new services is minimized while the return on investment is accelerated to just a few months, allowing carriers to self-fund additional deployment as demand develops," he adds.
For more information about Internet Photonics (Shrewsbury, NJ, and Marlborough, MA), visit the company's Web site at www.internetphotonics.com.