LONDON – Rusnano, the technology investment arm of the Russian state, has led a $35 million Series F financing of Ethernet chip company Aquantia Inc. (Milipitas, Calif.). Rusnano is investing $25 million and current and other new investors will contribute $10 million to the financing round.
Aquantia launched its 40-nm 10GBASE-T PHY chipset in 2011, as an ingredient in emerging LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) platforms for data center servers and switches. In March 2012 Intel launched a processor called Romley, and LOM server platforms, which is expected to drive increased sales of 10GBASE-T Aquantia said.
Aquantia plans to use the funds in part to establish a design center in Russia to perform chip design, software development and product testing in support of an R&D group at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters.
Aquantia, founded in 2004, has now raised in excess of $129 million.
"Aquantia is the only 10-gigabit Ethernet silicon provider to meet our investment criteria in the high-speed datacenter interconnect space. We believe big data and global data center traffic are going to see a tremendous swell in the next several years and Aquantia's technology is essential to improving server performance while realizing greater cost efficiencies," said Sergey Polikarpov, Rusnano managing director, in a statement issued by Aquantia.
"We are truly ecstatic about the take off of Intel's Romley platform and what it means as a watershed event for the near-term ubiquity of 10GBASE-T in the data center as well as future opportunity across the enterprise space," said Aquantia's president and CEO Faraj Aalaei, in the same statement.
Shipments of 10GBASE-T in data center switching and servers will total of approximately 6.5 million ports in 2013, and almost 20 million the following year, Aquantia said referencing Crehan Research as its source.
Related links and articles:
www.aquantia.com
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