NexTone Communications raised $35 million in Series D funding for its distributed and intelligent session management solutions for VoIP and other real-time IP services.
NexTone, which has provided intelligent session management solutions to more than 370 carrier and enterprise customers worldwide, estimates its customers now carry over 50% of all long-distance VoIP traffic in the world.
NexTone expects that as service providers and enterprises embark on large-scale VoIP deployments, real-time IP session management will become critical for interconnecting VoIP and IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) networks.
The company said it has experienced almost 100 percent growth in its business in the past year, due in large part to global demand from carriers deploying VoIP services. In the first three quarters of 2005, NexTone has added more than 100 new customers in 21 countries worldwide, as well as new sales offices in Asia, Europe, and Latin America to support the company's explosive international growth.
The up-value round was led by One Equity Partners (OEP), a private equity affiliate of JPMorgan Chase & Co.; also participating are existing investors BCE Capital, Core Capital, Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds, and Safeguard Scientifics. The new funding brings NexTone's total financing to $67.5 million.
http://www.nextone.com
 | The Evolution of Voice: The Network is the Switch  byDan Dearing |
| Carriers have traditionally delivered voice services from a central office (CO) via huge, expensive TDM switches that incorporate line cards that interface with users, a controller card for switch intelligence, and a backplane for intra-switch communications. VoIP changes all of that. Instead of a monolithic TDM switch, VoIP employs smaller, less expensive equipment that carriers and service providers can quickly and easily deploy throughout the network, in essence, turning the network itself into a switch. | |
