Greenfield Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, raised $21.5 million in third round venture funding for its next gen Ethernet switching silicon. The company offers a merchant silicon solution that combines low-cost Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and features such as full IPv6 routing, MPLS switching, scalable packet buffering, and scalable MAC, route and classification tables. Greenfield's "Packetry" family, which is aimed at metro edge deployments, supports service provider features including MPLS switching, stacked VLANs, Layer 2 VPN (martini and VPLS), Layer 3 VPN (RFC 2547bis) and IP tunneling.
The latest funding round was led by new investor JPMorgan Partners and included existing venture partners Sequoia Capital, Global Catalyst Partners and Walden International. The $21.5 million investment brings total funding in Greenfield to $48 million. The company said it expects to reach profitability next year. Greenfield also intends to pursue additional market opportunities and accelerate expansion plans. http://www.greenfieldnetworks.com
- Greenfield Networks is headed by Gary Smerdon, who previously served as VP of Marketing at Marvell. He joined Marvell through its acquisition of Galileo Technology, another supplier of Ethernet silicon solutions.
- Greenfield's engineering team is headed by Kamran Torabi, who previously was the senior manager at Cisco Systems responsible for the design and development of the Cisco Catalyst 2900XL, 3500XL and 3550XL. He joined Cisco through its acquisition of Grand Junction in 1995.
Greenfield's CTO is Harish Devanagondi, who is formerly from Cisco Systems, responsible for the forwarding ASICs used in the Catalyst 2900XL, 3500XL and 3550XL. He too was previously with Grand Junction.
