The Venture Codex

Participated · Series E · Jun 2011

Aquantia develops high-speed connectivity solutions for data centers, enterprise and WLAN applications, including its AQrate technology that can increase network speeds to 5 Gbps on existing Cat 5e/Cat 6 cables up to 100m. The AQrate products were first sampled in late 2013 and are currently in mass production. The company is led by president and CEO Faraj Aalaei. Aquantia employs over 160 people. It has raised a total of $199m to date. The company stated it will use the new funds to continue to expand operations. Aquantia is a market leader in high-speed Ethernet connectivity solutions serving cloud, data center, mobile and enterprise customers. Its core products are 10Gigabit Ethernet ICs, and the company recently announced a low-power, 28nm generation of 10GBASE-T silicon aimed at expanding adoption among cloud service providers and corporate data centers. Aquantia positions 10GBASE-T as the fastest-growing 10GE connectivity solution and expects the technology to become dominant in switches and servers. The company emphasizes delivering versatile, high-performance connectivity while lowering total cost of ownership for OEM customers. Management highlights strong market tailwinds from exploding wireless traffic and has received industry recognition including the GSA Most Respected Private Company Award and Cisco’s New Emerging Technology Supplier Award. Aquantia is venture-backed and located in Milpitas, California, and has completed recent financing to support business expansion. Aquantia designs 10GBASE‑T PHY chipsets and 10Gigabit Ethernet ICs used in cloud and large-scale data center servers and switches. The company launched an industry-leading 40nm 10GBASE‑T PHY chipset in 2011 and targets LAN‑on‑Motherboard (LOM) platforms. Aquantia cites accelerating demand following Intel’s Romley platform introduction and market growth projections from Crehan Research. It is venture-backed and described as having strong tier‑1 VC and strategic investor support. Aquantia is headquartered in Silicon Valley (Milpitas, Calif.) and plans to establish a new design center in Russia to support chip design, software development, and product testing. The company positions its products as delivering high performance and lower total cost of ownership for OEM customers. Aquantia designs silicon solutions based on 10GBASE-T technology that enable storage and networking applications for cloud computing and data center deployments. Its core product highlighted in the article is a 40nm 10GBASE-T PHY solution. The company announced demand for that 40nm PHY as the reason for its recent financing. To meet that demand it raised capital in a Series E round. The articles describe Aquantia primarily as a supplier of connectivity and PHY silicon rather than an end-user service provider. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article. Aquantia makes 10GBASE-T PHY chips intended to accelerate Ethernet from 1Gbps to 10Gbps in corporate data centers, with the goal of moving PHY functionality onto server motherboards. The company is ramping a new generation of chips to be built on a 40nm process by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which it says will cut power consumption and cost versus prior generations. Aquantia shipped a 90nm generation in 2008 and plans to ship the 40nm parts in 2010; the 40nm design can create a quad chip with up to 48 ports consuming about 3.5 watts per port. The market for these chips was described as still under a million chips per year, with chips selling for "tens of dollars," while analysts projected a potential of millions of ports by 2012. The company competes with Solarflare, Teranetics, Broadcom and Marvell and aims to leapfrog generations to drive down costs and power. Aquantia has 60 employees and has said the latest round was oversubscribed as it seeks to reach profitability.

Participated · Series D · Sep 2010

SandForce develops SSD processors designed to enable standard NAND Flash deployment across enterprise, client and industrial computing applications. The company is based in Saratoga, CA. It closed a $25M Series D funding round to support product commercialization and technology development. Management said the funding will help bring products to market, expand customer and partner support infrastructure, and accelerate core technology development. The round was led by Canaan Partners with participation from existing investors. In conjunction with the funding, Eric Young of Canaan Partners will join SandForce’s board of directors. SandForce Inc. is a Saratoga, California-based provider of storage and networking technologies that develops SSD (Solid State Drive) processors. Its products leverage commodity flash memory to transform data storage for enterprise and mobile computing applications. The company positions its SSD processors as a way to improve storage performance and efficiency across those markets. Management said the new funding will support an expansion phase and accelerate development of new products. SandForce closed a $21M Series C to finance this stage of growth. SandForce emerged from stealth to unveil its first product family, the SF-1000 SSD Processor, aimed at enterprise applications such as data centers and personal computers. The company says the SF-1000 is more reliable and offers greater data retention than competing chips. SandForce uses flash memory across enterprise and mobile computing and positions its SSD processors as replacements for enterprise-class hard disk drives. The product launch indicates a focus on displacing HDDs in enterprise environments with flash-based storage. Financial details are limited; the company previously raised funding while in stealth. Investors named in prior rounds include DCM and Storm Ventures.