Nexagent Gets £15M Second Round

LONDON -– Nexagent, the provider of independent multi-carrier interconnect services, today announced the closing of its £15m Series B funding led by Apax Partners Funds. The Series B round takes Nexagent’s total funding to £28.2m and includes follow on funding from A round co-leads Atlas Venture and Benchmark Capital, as well as Quester Capital and Lago Ventures. The funding will be used to complete the global roll out of Nexagent’s shared interconnect and monitoring points. Mike Grabiner, Director of Apax Partners, will join the Nexagent board.

Nexagent enables multi-national enterprises to cut telecoms costs and improve service by mixing and matching the best fit carriers in each territory to create a seamless, ubiquitous private telecoms network. For years multi-national enterprises have strived to get the benefits of outsourcing their telecoms infrastructure to a specialist solution provider while retaining control and flexibility. Nexagent has a totally new approach to solving this problem, but is not a carrier, solution provider or telecom reseller.

Nexagent’s independent interconnect service enables multi-nationals and their chosen solution provider (international carrier, integrator or virtual network operator) to select their optimal carrier in each country for them, and use Nexagent’s interconnect points and monitoring services to link the carriers together. The result is a seamless, customised, cost effective private network solution with unlimited geographic reach, and per site service level monitoring and guarantees.

Nexagent’s interconnect service eliminates the need for solution providers to build their own international network facilities or engage in costly customised process, software and network integration across multiple carriers.

Royce Murphy, CEO of Nexagent, comments: “We are very pleased to have Apax Partners join our team, and this funding allows us to accelerate deployment of the patent pending Nexagent system. Apax Partners has already added value by introducing Nexagent into new commercial opportunities and Mike Grabiner’s commercial experience at BT and Energis add an important perspective to our Board.”

Mike Grabiner comments, “All global enterprises face similar problems in securing truly global resilient networks to serve the business at the right cost. There is a natural desire to outsource network provision to a single service provider. However, experience has so far failed to live up to expectations and multi-nationals have therefore proved reluctant to pass over responsibility. Nexagent’s interconnect services enable a multi-carrier approach that will change this and accelerate telecoms outsourcing as multi-nationals can lower costs while actually increasing service control, coverage and flexibility.”

Nexagent Charles Muirhead, Founder and President, comments: “It is now clear that multi-carrier networks are here to stay. Firstly, the single global super-carrier has proven not to be economically viable - even the largest carriers are using international, regional and local carriers to provide coverage where their own networks cannot. Secondly the ‘extended enterprise’ will almost always involve multiple carriers as there is unlikely to be agreement ‘across the board’ to use the same carrier. Many global enterprises are now required to use multiple carriers to avoid a situation of dependency on any one single supplier. Finally, enterprises increasingly seek to continually manage costs by keeping multiple suppliers and limiting contracts to just one year. Today the question isn‘t are you integrating, it’s who’s doing the integration for you?” Gartner’s recent October 2003 report on Global Network Service Providers (NSPs) stated that; “despite consolidation, enterprise NSP choices will be even more complex during the planning period. What should enterprises do? First, ascertain what their network service requirements are before determining which NSP to use. Second, adopt a multiple-NSP strategy. Third, ensure they have contractual flexibility to adapt to changing needs and marketplace conditions”. Muirhead continues: “Nexagent’s independent interconnect service gives network integrators, carriers, and virtual network operators a simple way to offer their customers a seamless, flexible, multi-carrier managed IP network solution with real time monitoring of service per customer site. Furthermore the use of Nexagent’s shared interconnect simplifies the customer’s rollout of applications across partners using extranets, data centre consolidation, disaster recovery strategies, voice convergence, off-shoring and migration to a utility computing model and other network hosted services.”