Network management startup
Vernier Networks Inc. has grabbed a whopping $26 million in additional funding.
The company got $21 million in VC funding in a series E round led by the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family,
Venrock Associates, and $5 million in debt funding from
Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital.
Vernier was one of the original enterprise wireless LAN startups but has styled itself as a wired
and wireless network management company and almost totally revamped its management team.(See
Funding: Startup Roundup.)
"We've been growing very fast in this market," the firm's CFO Bhupi Singh tells
Unstrung. "We need this money to add new channels quickly.
The firm's major rival in the network management market is
Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) with its network access control (NAC) initiative.
The size of the round was surprising to some industry insiders
Unstrung spoke to. One source even described the funding as "a lifeline."
But Singh laughed off such talk as "industry FUD."
And other sources were more complimentary.
"Vernier seems to be getting traction with its
security play," one such source told us via email. "Venrock was the lead on the new round... impressive."
— Dan Jones, Site Editor,
Unstrung
