Akara, a provider of what it claims to be the first Optical Utility Services Platform, announced it has secured $30 million in second-round funding led by VenGrowth, a Canadian venture capital firm. There was also strong participation by Corning Innovation Ventures, a division of Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW) that strategically invests in high-growth optical networking companies, Dain Rauscher Wessels Morgan Keegan, Presidio Venture Partners LLC, Sumitomo Corporation, and first round investors Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.
Akara's optical service management solution, comprised of the Optical Utility Services Platform (OUSP) and Optical Utility Services Manager (OUSM), dramatically increases the service providers' and carriers' ability to meet the burgeoning enterprise demand for cost-effective delivery and management of business-critical, bandwidth-intensive services and applications.
The funding will be used to expand operations, customer service, sales and to continue development of future products and services. Akara's OUSP & OUSM enables service providers and carriers to deliver managed optical services such as remote storage, disaster recovery, video, content distribution and Gbe private line services.
Akara was founded to help service providers and carriers address a pressing issue facing enterprises. Businesses are experiencing growth in the volume of business-critical data traffic as well as the costs and complexities of the systems required to manage and control that data driving them toward managed services and outsourcing business models. Managed services and current outsourcing options via optical networks are limited by cost and complexity and cannot meet the quality of service and data integrity requirements enterprises need for their most sensitive data.
Akara's OUSP & OUSM were developed in partnership with carriers, storage service providers and enterprises. The technology leverages existing infrastructures to give service providers the flexibility to deliver new services over metropolitan and wide area networks that overcome the complexity, cost, distance, quality of service and data security issues associated with current optical services. Early work with lead customers indicates that Akara's solution can increase utilization of fiber assets by 90 percent and provide a capital cost savings of up to 75 percent versus currently available optical services.
About Akara:
Akara is a provider of an optical services management solution that enables service providers and carriers to cost effectively deliver optical services, such as high-speed remote storage and gigabit Ethernet private line to the growing enterprise market. For more information, visit www.akara.com.