Sayonara Cinta

Cinta Networks Corp. closed its doors on Friday, according to several of its former employees. The company made a combination optical switch and long-haul DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) transmission system.

There was a strange twist in the timing: On Monday of last week, Cinta touted a customer trial with Hawaii's Pacific LightNet Inc. (see Cinta Goes to Trial). "Cinta Networks is excited to move into the deployment stage of the WAVEJunction optical networking system," said John Vaughan, president and CEO of Cinta Networks, in the press release. Just four days later, excitement apparently having abated, the company shut the doors and dismissed its staff with no severance pay.

Cinta is the second company in entrepreneur Wu-Fu Chen's portfolio to shut down this month (see Wu-Fu Chen Startups Hit the Skids and OptiMight Be Shutting Down). Cinta had been cutting back for months, blaming some of its problems on September's terrorist attacks (see Cinta Gets Leaner, Cites Attacks ). And just last week, Chen hinted at Cinta's demise in an interview with Light Reading (see Wu-Fu Chen: It's Tough out There).

Cinta had raised $75 million in equity and debt financing since it began in 1999 (see Cinta: Paddling Towards an IPO? ). The company's board included Chen, Battery Ventures' Kenneth Lawler, Sequoia Capital's Michael Goguen, Cinta CEO John Vaughan, and company founder Chien-Yu Kuo. ADC Telecommunications Inc. (Nasdaq: ADCT), Corning Inc. (NYSE: GLW), Enron Broadband Services, Comdisco Ventures, Battery Ventures, and Sequoia Capital backed Cinta.

Cinta executives did not return calls requesting comment.

— Phil Harvey, Senior Editor, Light Reading
http://www.lightreading.com