Meraki sells wireless LAN hardware, security appliances, and the cloud architecture software that ties them together, all managed via a browser-based dashboard. Its products target large companies, schools, and organizations that want powerful networks without large IT teams. The company supports roughly 20,000 customer networks and reported over $20 million in revenue in Q2 2012. Meraki was spending about $65 million a year at the time of the article. It plans to use the new funding as a cash cushion, to pay for a new 100,000-square-foot headquarters, and to hire aggressively—especially in sales—to pull ahead of competitors. The company has also hired a new CFO to prepare for a potential IPO. Meraki builds cloud-based hardware and software to deploy and manage large-scale wireless networks. The company supplies WiFi to businesses, schools and other organizations and operates free public WiFi covering about four square miles in San Francisco. Customers named include Burger King, Albany State University, Stanford, Telmex, Epic Management and THQ. Meraki grew out of an MIT research project in 2006 and by the end of 2010 had deployed over 17,000 networks worldwide with more than 35 million client devices connected. Its core product combines cloud networking technologies with physical access-point hardware to simplify large deployments. The new funding will be used for R&D in its cloud networking technologies and to scale sales and marketing, and the company has raised $40 million in total to date. Meraki builds WiFi repeaters and operates free WiFi networks, providing its repeaters for free so people can access service without owning hardware. Its initial two-square-mile pilot in San Francisco attracted more than 40,000 users. The system uses solar-powered rooftop panels and the company says it overcame thousands of cases of interference to deliver almost 1 Mbps per user. Meraki has yet to make money because users are accessing the network mainly for free and the company does not plan to sell the repeaters to generate revenue. It is testing an ad-supported model and plans to monetize by providing its WiFi systems to developing countries such as Brazil and India. The company expects to have every San Francisco neighborhood up and running by mid-year.

Total raised

$75M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2012