Led · Equity · Sep 2023

Tarana Wireless builds G1, an ngFWA platform intended to improve broadband economics using licensed or unlicensed spectrum. G1 entered production in mid‑2021 and is deployed by more than 270 service providers in 19 countries and in 41 U.S. states, supporting use cases such as closing the digital divide and upgrading subscriber speeds. Revenues in G1’s first full year of sales (2022) were nearly $100M, and orders plus sales continued to climb in 2023. The company plans to accelerate sales and deployments and expand R&D investment to build on its wireless broadband advances. Tarana has invested over a decade of R&D and more than $400M of investment into its technology. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California, with additional R&D in Pune, India. Tarana’s core product is the G1 platform, a next‑generation fixed wireless access (ngFWA) system that aims to deliver fiber-class internet at a fraction of fiber’s cost and complexity. G1 uses multidimensional radio-signal optimization and custom ASICs (built after roughly $300M of dedicated R&D) and can serve up to ~1,000 customers per tower with up to gigabit-class speeds and optional symmetric upstream/downstream rates. The system requires briefcase-sized base node radios on towers and a small remote node at customers’ premises, and can operate in unlicensed spectrum without clear line-of-sight. Tarana commercially launched G1 in late 2021 and reports a rapidly growing customer base of more than 120 service providers. The company is on track to deliver over $100 million of revenue in 2022, reflecting strong early commercial traction. Headquartered in Milpitas, California, Tarana also maintains R&D operations in Pune, India, and frames its mission around closing the global digital divide by lowering deployment cost and time. Tarana Wireless develops the Gigabit 1 (G1) fixed wireless access system that optimizes radio signals to deliver gigabit-class broadband over unlicensed spectrum. The company positions G1 as a performance leader with industry-first breakthroughs enabling rapid deployment across high-density residential and underserved rural markets. Tarana is engaged with multiple providers participating in the U.S. Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) bidding process, using CBRS and 5 GHz spectrum, and is also working with multinational companies for mainstream markets globally. Proceeds from its recent financing will be used to continue customer trials of G1 and to prepare for and commence commercial launch of G1 products. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California, with additional research and development in Pune, India. Management highlighted the addition of Prime Movers Lab partner Dakin Sloss to Tarana's board. Tarana Wireless develops fixed wireless access network solutions, including the Tarana G1™ Gigabit residential broadband platform. The company’s radio technology emphasizes non‑line‑of‑sight long‑range links with built‑in anti‑jamming interference cancellation and multidimensional radio optimization. Tarana operates a Silicon Valley live demonstration network providing broadband connectivity to over 100 sites—mostly non‑line‑of‑sight—at distances up to 15 km from a single sector base‑node. It is commencing manufacturing of proprietary integrated circuits and finalizing a cloud‑based controller to enable ultra‑fast, large‑scale deployment of its radio platform. Tarana plans to bring commercial products to market later this year and aims to deliver fiber‑quality broadband to suburban and rural markets. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California, and maintains a development site in Pune, India. Tarana has created a new class of radio technology designed for fixed wireless access with strong immunity to obstructions, interference, changing conditions, and spectrum scarcity. Its Gigabit 1 fixed access system aims to overcome network economics challenges for service providers and deliver affordable gigabit bandwidth at scale using free unlicensed spectrum. The company says its technology can drive a tenfold improvement in the network economics of gigabit broadband access. Tarana planned to finish product development and start commercial trials with a number of tier‑1 operators following the announced financing. The company reported a headcount of 165 and planned to grow by more than 35 employees by mid‑2019 across engineering, operations, and outbound roles. Tarana is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and has additional staff in Pune, India.

Led · Equity · Mar 2023

Element8 is an Internet Service Provider based in Fort Worth, TX, that provides broadband network connections to tertiary and rural markets through multiple technologies. The company is led by President and CEO Kevin Grace, with an executive team that includes James Fair, Dustin Dvorak, Mike Field, and Jonathan Van Bring. Element8 secured a $200M strategic investment led by Digital Alpha. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate organic growth, pursue strategic acquisitions, and support greenfield network infrastructure expansion. In conjunction with the deal, Element8 moved to acquire Oklahoma City–based AtLink Services for an undisclosed sum; completion of the acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Element8 also announced a partnership with Tarana to leverage its next-generation fixed wireless access solution Gigabit 1 (G1), which delivers internet speeds up to a gigabit per second.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2023

Cloudian builds secure S3-compatible AI data lake platforms that offer military-grade security, scalability, and cloud integration. Its AI-ready data lake optimizes data access, supports data sovereignty requirements, and reduces costs by consolidating information into a single, cloud-like storage platform. Cloudian's geo-distributed architecture manages and protects object and file data at the edge, core, and cloud for both traditional and modern applications. The platform is proven with AI and analytics tools including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kafka, and Druid, and its solutions are available via AWS Marketplace, HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, and reseller partners worldwide. Led by CEO Michael Tso and headquartered in San Mateo, CA, the company plans to use new funding to drive product innovation and sales and marketing to meet demand for its AI data lake software. A $23M growth financing was announced in June 2024. Cloudian is a San Mateo, CA-based hybrid cloud data management firm that builds cloud-native software for S3-compatible object storage. Its software transforms standard servers, virtual machines, containers, or public cloud into pools of S3 API-compatible object storage co-located with data sources and consumers. The company highlights geo-distributed architecture to manage and protect object and file data at the edge, core, and in the cloud, along with seamless cloud integration and scalability. In January 2023 Cloudian closed $60 million in new funding, bringing total funding to $233 million. The company said the investment will accelerate its hybrid cloud platform capabilities and prepare it for its next phase of growth, and it named Bob Griswold chairman of the board. Cloudian positions its offering to simplify operations and help customers derive new value from data as organizations advance digital transformation. Cloudian focuses on on-premise storage and multi-cloud data management for organizations that need to store and manage very large data sets. Its platform is positioned as a data-management solution rather than just raw storage, aiming to keep data close to where it is created and used to reduce latency and network costs. The company has about 160 employees and serves roughly 240 enterprise customers, with strong traction in large video archives for entertainment companies and customers in healthcare, automotive and Formula One. Cloudian is beginning to address machine learning use cases by helping customers retain and manage training data from IoT sensors, cameras and medical imaging. The company plans to use new funding to expand global sales and marketing and to increase its engineering team, including investment in AI and core technology innovation. To date it has raised a total of $174 million. Cloudian provides a scalable platform that consolidates, manages and protects enterprise data through enterprise object storage systems and management solutions that bring cloud technology and economics to the data center. The company is based in San Mateo, California and is led by CEO Michael Tso. Cloudian reports an installed base of more than 200 customers. The company announced a $125M joint venture with Digital Alpha to accelerate adoption of its enterprise object storage systems. The financing package is intended to support expansion of Cloudian’s sales, marketing, engineering and customer-support organizations and to enable more flexible procurement options for customers. Cloudian is a San Mateo, CA–based provider of hybrid cloud object storage systems led by CEO and co-founder Michael Tso. The company offers Cloudian HyperStore, which enables service providers and enterprises to build scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions and manage hundreds of petabytes for use cases including backup/archive, media and entertainment, bioinformatics, and IoT. In August Cloudian made HyperStore available on AWS Marketplace so customers can purchase on‑premises storage on a metered basis and manage it alongside Amazon S3 as a single pool with one invoice. The company also has an OEM agreement with Lenovo to offer a Cloudian-based object storage appliance through Lenovo’s worldwide sales force and is integrated with Google Cloud Storage Coldline for hybrid archival storage. Cloudian intends to use the new funds to accelerate innovation, expand sales and marketing, and grow international operations. The company has raised $79M in total capital to date.

Participated · Equity · Feb 2022

Weka is a Campbell, CA-based AI-native data platform offering a cloud- and AI-native architecture deployable on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge. Its platform transforms legacy data silos into dynamic data pipelines to accelerate GPU workloads, AI model training and inference, and other performance-intensive workloads. Weka's technology is designed to improve efficiency, reduce energy consumption, and lower associated carbon emissions. Over 300 of the world’s largest AI and GPU deployments run on the WEKA Data Platform. The company intends to use the new funding to increase cash reserves, scale rapidly to meet global demand for AI-native data infrastructure, and expand investments in developing its data platform software. The financing will also provide liquidity to Weka employees. Weka is a software-based data management provider whose WEKA Data Platform is purpose-built for the cloud and AI era. The platform is cloud-native and optimized to handle complex data challenges, delivering performance improvements on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and in hybrid and multicloud environments. Weka emphasizes sustainability and seamless data portability as part of its offering. The company operates in over 20 countries and is led by CEO Liran Zvibel. Weka plans to expand platform features and cloud integrations and to support new use cases while accelerating delivery of solutions to customers. The company intends to use recent funding to drive product development, global expansion, and to scale cloud, customer success, sales, marketing, operations, and human resources teams, and to reach profitability. WEKA (WekaIO) offers a unified, software-defined distributed file/object data platform optimized for NVMe-flash and the hybrid cloud to support AI/ML, life sciences research and high-performance computing. Its solutions target GPU-accelerated, data-intensive workloads and are deployed by eight of the Fortune 50. The company reported strong FY21 traction with greater than 2x ARR growth, over 125% growth in new customers, and deployments in 18 new countries, and was recognized by Gartner as a Magic Quadrant Visionary. Momentum continued into 1QFY22, when WEKA said it achieved its 1QFY22 revenue target in the first 14 days of the quarter. WEKA said it will use the new proceeds to accelerate go-to-market activities, operations, and engineering and to improve integration with its ecosystem. WekaIO’s flagship product, WekaIO Matrix, is an NVMe-optimized, POSIX-compliant parallel file system that targets AI, machine learning, high-velocity analytics and HPC workloads. Matrix supports multiprotocol access (NFS, SMB), integrates object storage for economics at scale, and offers features such as snapshots, cloud backup and disaster recovery. The software can be delivered on pre-engineered solutions with HPE, Supermicro and Western Digital, installed on industry-standard Intel x86 servers, or used on the AWS Cloud; the company sells via a capacity-based pricing model. WekaIO highlights industry benchmark performance (SPEC SFS 2014 and VI4IO rankings) and says Matrix delivers very low latency and high throughput for GPU- and I/O‑heavy workloads. The company cites awards and industry recognition and says customers have validated the product in production environments. WekaIO plans to use new capital to accelerate its market trajectory, expand internationally, and increase investments in engineering, sales and marketing. Weka.IO develops software-defined storage (SDS) technology that simplifies deployment of enterprise and cloud storage. Its patent-pending technology is designed to scale storage to hundreds of petabytes, deliver tens of millions of IOPs and achieve sub-millisecond latency at cloud economics. The company positions its product to replace legacy storage systems and address a large addressable market. Weka.IO plans to use new funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and expand sales and marketing in the U.S. It also intends to continue building engineering teams in Tel Aviv and San Jose and to grow customer support and business teams across multiple geographies. The company was founded in 2013.

Led · Equity · Jun 2021

Quantela provides Outcomes-as-a-Service (OaaS) for urban infrastructure digitization, delivering IoT-enabled smart city solutions to city administrators. Its platform enables deployment of citizen-centric technologies that target outcomes such as public safety, congestion-free traffic, cleaner environments, and improved access to inclusive public services. The company positions its solutions to help cities become operationally efficient through cost savings and increased revenue generation. Headquartered in the USA with a presence in Europe and Asia, Quantela has completed more than 100 smart city deployments globally. It has received recognition including the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers award (2019), Tracxn Minicorn recognition, and CRN's IoT Innovators Award (2020). Quantela announced approximately $40 million in growth capital to support new OaaS projects and acquisitions. Quantela, founded in 2014 by CEO Sridhar Gadhi, provides Atlantis, an AI platform for smart city automation. Atlantis uses data aggregation, operational intelligence, deep learning and machine learning to process large volumes of real-time and historical data from IoT, open data sources and operational technology. The platform helps urban service providers, cities and communities make informed operational and planning decisions. Quantela has delivered and deployed Atlantis to dozens of cities and communities, including some 40 sites across the US, Europe and Asia, and has key contracts around the world. The company raised $10m in equity and intends to use the funds for market expansion in strategic locations across the United States and Europe.