BURLINGTON, Massachusetts, July 14, 2003 - Xelerated, a leading supplier of high-performance network processors, today announced that it has raised $12.5 million from Atlas Venture, Alta Partners and Startupfactory in a new round of financing. The funding will be used in ongoing sales and marketing of the XeleratorTM X10q network processor family, and the continued development of its next generation products. To date, the company has raised a total of $26 million.
"With our first chip, we have established ourselves in the industry as a technology leader, as recognized by our first Tier-1 customer engagements," says Johan Börje, CEO of Xelerated. "With a unique technology, early customer validation and new funding from leading investors, we are set to become one of the long term players in this market."
Xelerated's offering is the first programmable network processor to have the efficiency and performance of an ASIC. For other available network processors, flexibility in comparison with ASICs has come at the cost of lower efficiency and performance. This inefficiency has prevented other network processors from entering the high-volume markets.
"Xelerated has managed to take a breakthrough product to the market with fewer resources than the industry average," says Gerry Montanus, Atlas Venture. "We are excited about Xelerated's potential. With the strength of the technology and the market opportunity that this represents they are well positioned for success."
"I see Xelerated as one of the potential winners in the network processor industry," says Eric Mantion, at In-Stat/MDR. "Xelerated's data flow approach has made network processors a viable solution for the high-volume accounts now emerging in the enterprise backbone, metro and optical edge segments."
With Xelerated's data flow architecture there is no need for complex inter-processor interconnections or redundant data and instruction storage. This explains the remarkable efficiency and performance of Xelerated's solution. The X10q chip provides market-leading cost and power per port with 40 Gbps of programmable packet processing at 6.5W. The data flow approach also allows for fully deterministic execution, which compared to conventional multi-RISC-based architectures results in a much simpler programming model and guaranteed wire speed performance.
"I have followed the network processor developments for several years and until now have not seen one that I feel can meet my high performance objectives," says Earl Ferguson, former CTO of Foundry Networks. "Xelerated's solution is the first that I believe can supply true guaranteed line rate performance and meet the requirements of a wide range of future enterprise and service provider solutions."
"Xelerated's customer projects have confirmed that there is a volume market for highly efficient, programmable network processors," says Sven-Christer Nilsson, chairman of Xelerated, founder of Startupfactory and former CEO of Ericsson. "With its programmable high-density, low-power product offering, Xelerated can penetrate the high-volume accounts that have been out of reach for traditional network processor vendors."
About Xelerated
Xelerated is a fabless semiconductor company on the verge of revolutionizing the market for high-performance network processors. Its unique approach combines the efficiency of an ASIC with the programmability of traditional network processors. The company sampled its first generation of network processors in February 2003. The XeleratorTM X10q family of network processors consists of three products: the X10q-e, optimized for enterprise Ethernet and OC48 solutions; the X10q-m for advanced metro Ethernet applications; and the X10q-w for the high-end Sonet/SDH products. All products are equipped with 4 SPI4.2 ports. The offering also includes the XeleratorTM Software Development Kit and Reference Design Kit. Xelerated has offices in Burlington, San Jose and Stockholm.