Nistica Continues Broadband Triple Play Development with Series B Financing
Battelle Ventures, LP, and its affiliate fund, Innovation Valley Partners (IVP), have led the $9-million Series B funding round of Nistica, Inc., a global supplier of agile optical modules that simplify, automate and make the delivery of high-bandwidth applications affordable. The two parties first met at the NJTC Venture Conference in March of 2007, which Nistica attended as result of an invitation from the EDA.
"We made this investment for a couple of reasons," said Battelle Ventures/IVP General Partner Ralph Taylor-Smith. "First is the winning combination of technology, talent and timing. The company has developed substantial in-house intellectual property; the management team has deep, direct experience; and the market is primed for the emergence of an agile optical module vendor with disruptive cost models.
"Equally important, Nistica has its own 'triple play of customer applications' in the marketplace," continued Taylor-Smith. "Not only does the company help solve commercial broadband carriers' bandwidth problems, but it can also meet the growing need for compact optical instrumentation in the test & measurement industrial sector, as well as address photonic applications in the defense and government security sectors," he explained.
The company's patented FLEDGE technology platform, on which its initial suite of Telcordia-qualified products is based enables edge networks to scale at healthy margins through agile optical modules. "We were first to market with a new class of lean, agile optical modules to automate the edge and metro core of service-provider networks," said Ashish Vengsarkar, Nistica CEO.
Series A participants Novitas Capital (formerly PA Early Stage Partners), Technology Venture Partners and private investors joined the round, as did new, strategic investor Finisar Corporation, a leader in fiber-optic solutions for high-speed networks, with which Nistica separately announced a partnership in February 2008.
In addition to this financing, the three-year-old Bridgewater, N.J.-based company had received a $1-million Edison Innovation Fund investment in May of 2007 from the EDA, for a total post-Series A capital infusion of $10 million. The EDA investment will be used as working capital and to buy equipment to fund business growth, which will enable Nistica to hire the design help to keep products on schedule.
"Since the $5.2-million Series A round in 2006," said Vengsarkar, "the company has significantly expanded in global markets, with strategic partnerships with Fujikura Ltd. and Finisar Corporation, and has more than a dozen customers worldwide." The current round, he said, will enable the company to scale production, introduce products and expand customer support.