In its revelation, Innovium is set to take advantage of the venture capital environment by devising semiconductor based solutions to address the networking challenges faced by date centers.
The first round of Series A funding closed at the start of 2015 and was led by venture capital firms Walden Riverwood Ventures and Capricorn Investment Group, with participation from S-Cubed Capital and Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures.
This was soon after co-founders Mohammed Issa and Puneet Agarwal left their senior positions at Broadcom Ltd. And joined hands to start Innovium in December 2014 along with Rajiv Khemani who leads the venture.
Another round of Series B later in 2015 helped Innovium raise funds, hitting the $50 million mark. It was led by private equity firm, Greylock Partners and saw the participation of all four existing investors.
In conjunction, Asheem Chandna of Greylock, Dipender Saluja of Capricorn, Lip-Bu Tan of Walden International, and Mark Stevens of S-Cubed have joined Innovium’s board of directors in this venture.
Innovium designs and devices products to aid organizations and aims to create products that help companies benefit from all the latest connectivity trends, including the adoption of mobile, video, anything-as-a-service (XaaS), big data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) of the connected gear.
Rajiv Khemani, CEO and founder of Innovium, said:
“Innovium is laser-focused on developing revolutionary semiconductor solutions to meet our customers’ most critical needs. We are delighted to receive top-tier investor support towards this mission.”
“Domain knowledge and strong execution track record are critical to the success of any new venture. Innovium’s team members have delivered successful products widely deployed in a range of infrastructure applications across the world. With a clean-sheet design, we believe that Innovium can deliver a truly compelling solution,” said Lip-Bu Tan, Chairman of Walden International.
However, according to company claims, it is in making of a “revolutionary” semiconductor designed to power Ethernet networking infrastructure in data centers and plans to compete contemporaries like Broadcom. Another key player in the industry is Cavium Inc. where Khemani served as the COO until 2013.
Asheem Chandna, Partner at Greylock Partners has stated that, “The secular move to the cloud has created a tremendous high-growth market opportunity for data-center networking solutions.”
“Innovium has put together one of the industry’s strongest Ethernet switching teams and they are uniquely qualified to partner with cloud providers and networking vendors to deliver the next generation of solutions,” he added.
While Capricorn Investment Group, Managing director, Dipendar Saluja said, “Large scale data-centers have special requirements that don’t require ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions. Innovium’s focused innovations promise to set it apart from alternatives.”
