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Tarari Inc., the award-winning acceleration company, announced today that it has successfully completed a Series B round of private equity financing for $13.8 million. Morgan Stanley Venture Partners is the lead second-round investor and is joined by all of the first-round investors: Crosspoint Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Miramar Venture Partners and XMLFund. "We are excited and proud to have Morgan Stanley Venture Partners lead our series B round," said Randy Smerik, president and CEO of Tarari Inc. "This round of funding was over-subscribed, and we secured more funding than originally planned due to the strong interest in the company by the investment community. In fact, all of our original funding partners also participated in this Series B funding. We have a tremendous team of people at Tarari, and the addition of Morgan Stanley as a top tier investor further validates our business direction and the ability of our team to execute on it ..." Tarari will apply the financing towards supporting the ramp of customer engagements and sales, as well as continued product and technology development for its key target markets: -- XML/Web Services - Tarari's next generation silicon is designed for OEMs, ISVs and enterprises that require the acceleration of XML processing and need to include it in the systems they are building. With its recently announced Random Access XML (RAX) Content Processor, Tarari has taken a big leap forward in allowing critical data in XML formatted messages and files to be accessed at very high speeds. -- Network Security - Content-based threats are a top security concern for enterprises and service providers today. Tarari's Regular Expression (RegEx) Content Processors and AntiVirus Content Processors will be further enhanced as they are used to accelerate processing in Content Filtering, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Intrusion Detection/Prevention and Compliance systems. -- Integrated Cryptography - Tarari's acceleration offerings incorporate RSA public key, bulk encryption/decryption with 3DES/DES, message digests with SHA-1 and true Random Number Generation. Tarari will extend this support to other standards such as WS-Security. "Our research and experience has led us to conclude that while there is a big demand for XML and Web Services there is also a tremendous problem due to the performance bottlenecks caused by XML processing," said Kristen Hughes, vice president at Morgan Stanley Venture Partners. "Tarari Content Processors provide a solution today that can be used across the enterprise -- from high-speed switches, to appliances, to application servers." "I have been working closely with Tarari from the start, and they have a real advantage due to their deep expertise in their target markets," said Bob Hoff, general partner at Crosspoint Venture Partners. "With this Series B funding completed, Tarari has the resources to extend its leadership even further in building and deploying silicon-based acceleration solutions for XML and network security systems." With the completion of the Series B round, Kristen Hughes of Morgan Stanley Venture Partners and Rick Fink of Miramar Venture Partners have joined Tarari's board of directors.