PHYSICS

NetEffect Inc., a leader in developing high-performance networking silicon, today announced that it has received $22 million in Series A financing. NetEffect, formerly Banderacom, is a fabless semiconductor company developing integrated circuits to enable the next generation of high-performance, multi-gigabit Ethernet solutions. TL Ventures led the financing. They were joined by new investors Granite Ventures, TI Ventures and Duchossois Technology Partners, along with existing investors Austin Ventures, JatoTech Ventures and Infinity Capital. NetEffect is led by an experienced management team that includes Rick Maule, president and chief executive officer; Terry Hulett, vice president of engineering; and Rob Senders, chief financial officer. Maule is a former 3Com executive and turnaround expert. In addition to Hulett, NetEffect's engineering team includes the key architects and designers from Banderacom's InfiniBand developments -- a group that successfully worked together to deliver 10Gb production chips. The team has unique expertise and intellectual property that allows NetEffect to address next-generation data center problems. "The NetEffect team has already proven that it can deliver 10Gb networking solutions," said Eric Rothfus, Managing Director of TL Ventures. "This funding is an endorsement of NetEffect's leading position in the deployment of next-generation, high-performance multi-gigabit Ethernet solutions." NetEffect's silicon products address one of the most critical problems facing data centers: with data center traffic growing at over 200 percent a year, today's networking technologies simply cannot supply the required bandwidth. NetEffect's silicon products allow Ethernet to easily scale to meet data center demands, using next-generation iWARP RDMA Ethernet. iWARP, which is compatible with today's Ethernet infrastructure, virtually eliminates networking overhead, enabling the delivery of multi-gigabit Ethernet and true convergence of data center traffic for networking, storage, and clustering over a single network technology. "The benefits of RDMA technology are compelling. iWARP solutions will allow these benefits to be available to a much broader market," said David Ford, Director Of Engineering at Network Appliance. "RDMA over Ethernet will enable higher performance IP-based cluster and storage protocols to be supported over a common Ethernet fabric." "Corporate data centers need speed and flexibility in their networking, storage and clustering fabric in order to become more adaptive to changing IT and business conditions," stated Brian Cox, Worldwide Product Line Manager for Business Critical Servers, HP. "The addition of TOE and RMDA are important steps in driving Ethernet technology to become an even more pervasive fabric." "The positive response to NetEffect's strategy and products has been very gratifying," said Rick Maule, president and CEO of NetEffect. "This funding enables NetEffect to rapidly deliver industry-leading Ethernet solutions to the market and achieve significant market penetration and rapid revenue growth." This funding establishes a restructuring of the company for a new Series A investment. In conjunction with the new focus of the business, the board of directors has been restructured to include Rick Maule as chairman of the board, and directors: Eric Rothfus (TL Ventures), Clark Jernigan (Austin Ventures), Sam Kingsland (Granite Ventures), Bruce Graham (Infinity Capital) and Walt Thirion (JatoTech Ventures). "We are extremely pleased to have such a strong investment syndicate with a proven track record for the semiconductor and communications markets," said Clark Jernigan of Austin Ventures. "We are all very excited about this opportunity to drive the next generation of data center Ethernet technology."