Press Releases
Communications Giants Invest $40 Million in Juniper Networks, Inc.—a Total of $56 Million—to Transform the Internet
Ericsson, Nortel (Northern Telecom), the Siemens/Newbridge Alliance, 3Com, UUNET Form Investment Relationship with Juniper Network
Mountain View, CA - September 2, 1997 - Juniper Networks, Inc. today announced that it has signed an investment agreement with many of the world's leading communications and networking companies and has received from them an unprecedented investment of $40 million in equity financing.
Making the agreement are Ericsson, a world leader in fixed and mobile networks; Nortel (Northern Telecom), a leading provider of digital networking solutions; 3Com Corporation, a leader and pioneer of the data networking industry; the Siemens/Newbridge Alliance, a leading provider of comprehensive ATM solutions for network service providers; and Worldcom Inc.'s subsidiary, UUNET Technologies, Inc., the world's largest Internet service provider. The investment completes a third-round of financing and brings the total investment in Juniper Networks to $56 million. Prior rounds of financing came from premier technology venture capitalists including Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; New Enterprise Associates; Benchmark Capital; Crosspoint Venture Partners; and Institutional Venture Partners.
"The explosive growth and use of the Internet is causing traffic bottlenecks, quality issues and performance constraints. This is creating a need for a whole new class of high performance and reliable data communications device that can scale to match the rapidly increasing bandwidth available from today's fiber optic networks," said Scott Kriens, chairman and CEO of Juniper Networks, Inc. "This new class of device will be necessary for the transformation of the Internet from today's service standard to a high performance, multi-purpose commercial network utility."
In addition to ownership interests, the participating companies have the opportunity to integrate Juniper Networks technology with their existing product lines and services worldwide.
"The cooperation of these industry leaders, who collectively represent over $75 billion of annual sales to virtually every major networking customer, will be a strong foundation for the delivery of Juniper Networks technology around the world," said Kriens.
From its beginnings as a source of connectivity for a small community of users, the Internet has grown to become both a massive success and a massive challenge—a success on the dimension of use and creative applications and a challenge on the dimension of consistent and uniform bandwidth and user experiences.
Juniper Networks is focused on the development and delivery of high performance networking products for the growing Internet market. Juniper Networks expertise includes both high-speed integrated circuit design skills from the computer industry as well as extensive internetworking protocol software and system design backgrounds from the networking industry. This intersection of industries brings fundamental innovations in the design of new communications architectures, which are necessary in meeting new networking standards.
World-Class Management and Expertise
Juniper Networks brings a world-class management team and experts in both Internet software and networking systems. A former founder and vice president of sales and operations at StrataCom, Scott Kriens is chairman and CEO. At StrataCom, Mr. Kriens spearheaded the sale of their Frame Relay and ATM networks to carriers for the first such industry service offerings. The CFO is Marcel Gani who has served as VP and CFO of Grand Junction Networks, Primary Access and NeXT Computer, as well as 12 years at Intel Corporation. Peter Wexler is VP of engineering and a former VP of engineering at Bay Networks. Both Joe Furgerson, director of marketing at Juniper Networks, and Gary Heidenreich, VP of operations, are from 3Com. Steven Haley is VP of sales and a former VP of sales at Cisco and StrataCom.
The company was founded by 3 leading system and IP architects. CTO Pradeep Sindhu, a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC, was a key architect of Sun's first high performance multiprocessor systems. Dennis Ferguson is an Internet expert from MCI and Advanced Network Services, where he did extensive development on both the original NSFNet and InternetMCI. Bjorn Liencres was hardware technical lead and an architect of Sun's Ultra Enterprise family of servers.
About Juniper Networks, Inc.
Juniper Networks, based in Mountain View, California, was founded in February 1996, to design, develop and deliver integrated hardware and software solutions for the Internet that address the scalability, performance and quality issues of continuous and explosive growth.
