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Vikas Varma led Stoke raises Series E funding
By siliconindia
California: Santa Clara based mobile broadband gateway provider, Stoke has raised its Series E funding of $17 million. The Vikash Varma led firm has till date raised $92 million. The funding was led by Focus Ventures a venture capital firm with a core focus in the expansion stage and it is mostly known for its late stage funding in Cisco acquired Starent.
Mobile broadband is experiencing tremendous growth due to rapid uptake of smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry, laptops with 3G modems, and ofcourse, the buzzing tablets. Infact, connected devices are predicted to reach more than 500 billion in five years' time. The challenge for mobile carriers is the massive growth in data traffic on their mobile networks, which ironically are not architected for this level of data traffic. Stoke has been successful at helping carriers manage this growth, resulting in delivery of over 200 units of its SSX-3000 mobile broadband gateway since initiating commercial production in late 2008. This strong operator demand resulted in Stoke closing 2010 with revenues more than four times greater than 2009, and Stoke is expecting triple digit growth again in 2011.
Stoke Session Exchange(SSX-3000) provides foundational functions, including multi-access technology support, mobility between access networks, high throughput, and high scalability. The multi-function, multi-access SSX-3000 is optimized for high-speed multimedia packet data services and for reducing network operating costs. The operator cost is contained as it delivers mobile broadband data services by offloading traffic from the operators' current network infrastructures. According to a new study from ABI Research, about 16 percent of mobile data is diverted from mobile networks today, and that is expected to increase to 48 percent by 2015. But data traffic itself will have grown by a factor of 30, meaning that offloaded data will expand 100-fold. "Our outlook for growth in 2011 is promising, given our central role in the strong operator investment focus on optimizing current network assets and preparing for or deploying LTE," says Varma, President and CEO at Stoke. On the same note the new round of funding took place.
The company's existing investors also participated in the round, including DAG Ventures, Integral Capital Partners, Pilot House Ventures, Net One Systems, DoCoMo Capital, Mobile Internet Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Kleiner Perkins. "Achieving this level of growth during the global economic crisis is proof of the strength of the company, the relevance of their technology to top tier carriers, and the high potential of the mobile broadband market," said James Boettcher, General Partner, Focus Ventures.
