NBT TECHNOLOGY RAISES $6.6 MILLION IN SERIES A FINANCING
Emerging software firm creates new technology that enables high performance access to files and data storage across Wide Area Networks.
Centralization of key datacenter infrastructure is now possible without giving up the high performance of distributed systems.
San Francisco, CA – January 7, 2003 – NBT Technology Inc. (NBT) announced today that the company has closed a $6.6 million Series A round of financing from Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Jim Swartz of Accel and Christopher Schaepe of Lightspeed will take seats on NBT’s board.
Dr. Steve McCanne, the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of NBT and a pioneer in networking protocols, explained that slow throughput has always plagued wide area networks (“WANs”) particularly for applications like networked storage. “While networking technologies have revolutionized data communications across a global environment, breakthroughs in storage technologies have been limited to the data center and server complex, and little progress has been made toward extending the storage network architecture across the WAN.” NBT’s products accelerate the performance of networked storage and other client server systems over long distances by orders of magnitude.
A world renowned innovator in computer networking, Dr. McCanne was selected by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 100 young innovators in the world in 2002, and one of only a small number named in the fields of software and internet technology. During the 1990s he held research positions at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), where he developed widely used software and made fundamental contributions to the Internet protocols in areas including packet filtering, network multicasting, and streaming media. Following LBL, he held a post as a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley.
In 1998, Dr. McCanne left U.C. Berkeley and co-founded FastForward Networks, a network infrastructure software company, where he was the Chief Technology Officer. FastForward Networks was acquired by Inktomi in October of 2000, and he was soon named CTO at Inktomi as well.
“NBT’s products allow customers to deploy more economical and efficient centralized storage without giving up the superior performance of distributed systems,” said Dr. McCanne. “Moreover, we’ve come up with a fundamental set of innovations that solve the general case of access to data, which includes very challenging problems in areas like remote backup over wide area networks and moving very large files over long distances.”
Large enterprises spend a significant fraction of their IT budgets on data storage systems. As a direct result of the poor performance of wide area networks, enterprise customers are forced to build and operate redundant local data centers worldwide to ensure that mission critical data is readily accessible by their employees. The complexity and cost of those data centers is very high, so a trend toward consolidation is underway, but WAN performance limits mean that companies can’t centralize key technologies like data storage.
“NBT has solved one of the most difficult challenges facing the enterprise user of wide area networks,” said Jim Swartz, general partner at Accel Partners. “And they’ve done it in a powerful new way which leapfrogs over the companies using file caching or data compression approaches.”
Jerry Kennelly, the CEO and co-founder of NBT added: “Despite the staggering advances in information technology over the last decade, wide area network throughput is still very limited because of the negative effects of high latency on most client server applications.” Mr. Kennelly is a seasoned high technology executive who most recently served as the Executive Vice President of Inktomi. Prior to Inktomi, Mr. Kennelly has had a long career as an executive at companies like Oracle, Tandem, Sybase and Gain Technology.
Mr. Kennelly continued, “We have patented key innovations that combine new intellectual property in several areas that when combined bring LAN-like performance to WANs. Our customers will be able to design and implement centralized corporate IT architectures to serve distributed users in ways that have been impossible until now.”
“We are pleased to back this team of repeat entrepreneurs developing highly differentiated solutions based on multidisciplinary innovations spanning storage, networking and application-level optimization,” said Christopher Schaepe, general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “NBT has the potential to execute a leveraged go-to-market strategy involving partners while retaining the breadth required to become a substantial standalone company.”
About Accel Partners
Accel Partners is a venture capital firm dedicated to helping outstanding entrepreneurs build category-defining technology companies. In order to meet this challenge with a "prepared mind," we focus the investment of over $3 billion under management in just two areas: Networking and Software.
Accel Partners has backed over 200 companies and has a history of leading investments in category-defining technology companies such as Real Networks, Veritas, UUNet, Foundry, AMCC, Agile Software, and Macromedia. Accel's mission is to both identify and be the very best partner to the category-defining companies of tomorrow.
About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners combines extensive venture capital and operating experience to assist entrepreneurs in creating industry-leading technology companies. Lightspeed manages $2.3 billion in funds and focuses on early-stage investments in the United States, Israel and Europe.
The partners of Lightspeed have contributed to the success of more than 275 companies since 1971, including AirGate PCS, Brocade, Ciena, Electronics for Imaging, FedEx, Galileo Technology, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Informatica, Kiva Software, Phone.com, Quantum Effect Devices, Sirocco Systems and Vantive.
About NBT Technology, Inc.
Founded in 2002, NBT Technology is an early stage technology company attacking the problems of wide area network performance. The company’s products allow people separated by thousands of miles to share files as if they were all on the same local area network. The company is privately held and is based in San Francisco, California.
Contact:
Alan Saldich
NBT Technology, Inc.
(415) 348-2935
alan@nbttech.com
www.nbttech.com |
