Tejas Networks acquires funding of $20mn

Bangalore, Nov 7: Aiming to emerge as a global one stop shop for all optical network transport products, Tejas Networks today announced raising of a D series of equity funding to the tune of 20 million US Dollars.

Led by Sandstone Capital, a Boston based India focused Fund, the fund would also include contribution from existing share holders.

This includes its Founder Chairman Gururaj Desh Deshpande, Battery Ventures, Intel Capital and a new investor Sun Technologies.

The six-year-old company began its operations with a first round of investment of five million dollars in the year 2000. In the two other rounds, it raised nine million dollars in 2002 and 15 million dollars last year.

Company Co-founder and CEO Sanjay Nayak told newspersons here that the newly acquired funding would be utilised for enhancing the R and D capability to produce new Packet Aware Optical Products, global marketing strategies and to add another 100 personnel to the existing strength of 300.

The Company which ended last year with a turnover of Rs.130 crore last year, expected to close this year with Rs.250 crore.

Crossing a major milestone of shipping 20,000 units this year, the company had during the last three quarters shipped 10,000 units, Mr Nayak said adding ''going forward we aim to secure 50 per cent of total revenue through exports''.

He said during the last few years Tejas had developed a portfolio of world class products and had seen a tremendous growth in business. ''With a solid foundation in place, we decided that this was the right time to invest aggressively and scale our business to next level'' he added.

Tejas Networks is an emerging leader in next generation optical networking products for the global market. Tapping into the exploding need to deploy broadband data services based on ethernet, while still supporting traditional voice services, Tejas pioneered the development of cost effective, software differentiated next generation SDH/SONEt products that enable telecom carriers to converge traditional voice based networks with the new data dominated networks.

UNI