NetContinuum Raises $26M In VC Funding
Start-up company developing scalability tools for data centers

May 22, 2001 -- NetContinuum, a start-up developing scalability tools for Internet data centers, today received a vote of confidence from the venture capital community in the form of $26 million in second-round financing.
NetContinuum, founded in January 2000, is developing integrated hardware and software to improve the way data centers run complex business applications. If the technology works, it could allow hosting providers to offer advanced managed services with lower investment in processing power and memory.
The new round of financing was led by NIF Ventures/Daiwa Securities Group, with participation by Menlo Ventures, which led the first round of funding, along with new investors Adams Street Partners, Invus Group and Siemens Venture Capital.
"Given today's challenging investment climate, such strong support from new and existing investors is gratifying,'' said Ravi Sethi, chairman, president and CEO of NetContinuum. "This kind of financial commitment speaks to the high caliber of the team, the critical solutions we are developing, and the considerable market opportunity for these solutions.''
Sethi founded the company along with chief technology officer Jan Bialkowski, former chief technologist at Bay Networks. The pair previously worked together as co-founders of Berkeley Networks.
NetContinuum is based in Santa Clara, Calif. and also has a software development operation in Bangalore, India.
The company is working to perfect a new approach to network and computer architecture, which it calls a "Unified Content Service architecture," that will address inefficiencies that currently limit the scalability of complex web applications.
NetContinuum's technology is based upon a different approach to programming Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), which are chips that can be customized for specific tasks by connecting existing circuit building blocks in new ways.
The end goal is to allow data center providers to offer advanced applications that require less processing power and memory.
"The Internet data center is at the core of the e-business ecosystem,'' said Jim Timmins, general partner and managing director, NIF Ventures/ Daiwa Securities. "NetContinuum's solutions radically improve the economics and efficiency of the data center application-serving infrastructure.''
"Today's data center infrastructure for delivering business-critical content and applications over the Internet is highly complex and has high capital and operating cost,'' added John Jarve, managing director of Menlo Ventures. "Both enterprise and service provider customers can address these deficiencies by using NetContinuum's solutions that collapse multiple network elements, reduce cost, and ease management complexity.''
NetContinuum, Inc. received its initial venture funding from a group including Menlo Ventures and MKS Ventures. Additional investors include angel investors who are executives and board members of companies such as Cisco, InfoSpace, Vodafone/Airtouch.