Infineta nabs $15M for WAN optimization

The company gets support from Rembrandt, Alloy, and North Bridge

Infineta Systems, a provider of hyper-scale WAN (Wide Area Networks) optimization systems, announced Monday morning the close of its $15 million Series B round of funding led by Rembrandt Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Alloy Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. Additionally, the company announced that In Sik Rhee, a partner at Rembrandt Venture Partners, will be joining Infineta’s board of directors.

Founded in 2008, the San Jose-based company was launched with the aim to solve the problem of how to hyper-scale “machine-to-machine” WAN traffic. A number of companies anticipate the need to increase their WAN bandwidth over the next two to four years, and industry analysts predict that companies will require a 30x increase in storage capacity over the next ten years. But purchasing more WAN bandwidth is expensive.

Machine-to-machine “big traffic” requires roughly ten-times more data than user-to-machine traffic as it supports applications such as long-distance live migrations, replication, remote backup, advanced frameworks, and apps written for WAN-based distribution.

Infineta takes the helm with its Data Mobility Switch (DMS) product, which provides five- to ten-times more bandwidth capacity gains, IP traffic acceleration, and critical application prioritization and assurance over multi-gigabit WAN links. Infineta’s DMS, which is powered by the Velocity Dedupe Engine, is the industry’s first-ever solution for operating at 10Gbps wire speeds.

“Our investment in Infineta and its team represents our conviction that there is an enormous shift occurring in the marketplace today – driven by the extension of virtualization, Big Data processing, and the mobility of storage pools,” stated In Sik Rhee of Rembrandt Venture Partners, in a statement. “We believe the superhighway for cloud-based networks presents a significant opportunity for customers and that’s where Infineta is strongly positioned with a highly differentiated product and unique technology.”

Rhee is also one of the founders of Kiva (one of the first application server providers), as well as the co-founder of Opsware, formerly LoudCloud.

This round of funding follows close on the heels of Infineta’s $15 million Series A round of funding, announced in May, bringing the company’s total raised to $30 million. Infineta plans to use the new funds to beef up its sales, marketing, and engineering teams as it anticipates an increased demand for its products.