Juniper, NEC and mystery silent investor fund $10 million B round
Data center switch maker BLADE Network Technologies got another $10 million injection in its B round of funding. Backers in this round included OEM customers Juniper Networks and NEC, and a third “technology powerhouse” acting as a silent investor.
Juniper’s EX2500 top-of-rack 10G Ethernet data center switch is supplied by BLADE.
Garnett & Helfrich Capital, BLADE’s founding investor, completed the round.
Privately-held BLADE has now accumulated $40 million in funding since being spun off from Nortel in 2006, and its valuation is now $230 million, says CEO Vikram Mehta. The amount of Juniper’s investment in BLADE’s B round was not disclosed.
In a prepared statement, Juniper said BLADE is “well aligned” with Juniper’s own data center strategy and vision. Juniper is working with IBM – also a BLADE customer – and other companies on its Project Stratus cloud computing architecture. BLADE is now apparently part of the Stratus project too.
BLADE will use the investment to ramp up R&D and sales and marketing as it and its OEM customers battle Cisco for data center mind and marketshare. The company plans to develop a 64-port 10G top-of-rack switch, management products for virtualized data centers, and plans to be the first vendor in the industry to unveil 10G switches at less than $100 per port, Mehta says.
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