10 September 2003 Pittsburgh, PA Lightwave--Laurel Networks, a provider of high-performance service edge routers, today announced that it has closed a $20 million third round of funding, bringing total investment in the company to $102.3 million. The new participant in the third round is primary investor CIENA. This fund raising is inclusive of funds raised under a separate transaction between Optovation and Laurel Networks. Existing investors New Enterprise Associates, Trinity Ventures, and Worldview Technology Partners also participated in this latest round of funding.
In addition to CIENA's investment in Laurel, the companies also jointly announced that they have entered into a worldwide reseller agreement that gives CIENA the ability to market, sell and support Laurel's ST200 Service Edge Router to service providers across the globe.
"Laurel's ST200 Service Edge Router uniquely supports applications experiencing growth in key global markets, such as IP VPNs and next-generation broadband deployment," said Jim Collier, CIENA's senior vice president, corporate development. "Their IP edge
capabilities provide a significant complementary addition to our growing LightWorks portfolio, further expanding our ability to support efficiency and profitability for new and existing services on carrier networks."
"This is a key milestone for Laurel. We have a leading product, a growing list of customers and now the further investment and strategic partnerships required to rapidly grow our market presence in the service edge router market category we created," said Atul Bansal,
president and chief executive officer of Laurel Networks. "This latest round of funding coupled with our global reseller and support agreement with CIENA puts us in a strong position to further expand our global sales, support and manufacturing presence."
Laurel's flagship product, the ST200 Service Edge Router is designed with the features required at the edge of a service provider IP/MPLS backbone. The ST200 combines Internet-class routing, multi-service support, integrated service management and unprecedented architecture flexibility to support current and evolving service provider requirements -- all at wire speed. The company was founded in 1999.