Aarohi Bags $13.5MAarohi Bags $13.5M

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Aarohi Communications, Inc., provider of FabricStream(TM) enabling technology for intelligent storage networking equipment, today announced the close of a $13.5 million series B1 financing round. The round was led by new corporate investors McDATA Corporation (Nasdaq: MCDT) and Infineon Technologies (NYSE: IFX) and included participation from previous investors. The round brings Aarohi's total funding to date to over $36 million. The new investment will support continued expansion of the company's sales, marketing, product development and customer service.

"Aarohi's FabricStream technology allows storage equipment vendors to build application processing intelligence into their customers' storage networks," said Ameesh Divatia, chief executive officer at Aarohi. "FabricStream accelerates application performance, simplifies manageability and reduces overall TCO. Despite a challenging funding environment, we completed the Series B1 round at a higher valuation than our Series B round from December 2002, reflecting the company's measurable progress toward capturing a defensible leadership position in the emerging storage application processing market."

Aarohi FabricStream technology, which combines purpose-built software and silicon, enables application processing technology to be integrated into storage networking platforms such as fabric switches, directors, appliances, servers and storage arrays. To date, five leading storage management application software developers have joined the FabricStream Alliance Partner Program and committed to support FabricStream in their products, and several leading storage hardware vendors plan to begin shipping FabricStream-enabled products in 2004.

"Aarohi FabricStream technology makes a major contribution to the evolution of next generation intelligent storage networking platforms, offering scalability and advanced network management capabilities," said Mark Tyndall, vice president of business development for the wireline communications business group of Infineon Technologies North America Corp. "Our investment in the company and its technology is part of a growing relationship between Aarohi and Infineon, and is in line with our strategic plan to address the fast growing storage networking market."

Aarohi Inc.