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Reeves: Three-Time Winner
Networking entrepreneur raises $20m for Wallingford company
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Business New Haven
4/28/2003
By: BNH
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WALLINGFORD - Networking company Mangrove Systems announced April 15 that it had raised more than $20 million in an initial round of funding.
Companies participating in the round were venture-capital firms Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Columbia Capital and Silicon Valley Bank of California.
Mangrove Systems was founded by Jonathan Reeves, the company's CEO. Reeves also founded Sahara Networks, which was acquired by Cascade Communications for in excess of $200 million, and then later created Sirocco Systems, another networking company, acquired by Sycamore Networks in a deal valued at $3 billion in stock in 2000.
Mangrove Systems said it is developing a networking switching system to allow telecommunications carriers to migrate their existing infrastructures to next-generation protocols without expensive upgrades.
The investment comes at a time when venture backing nationwide has fallen to levels not seen since early 1998.
Reeves says his company will add 20 to 25 employees, primarily engineers, to its 28-person payroll by the end of the year.
The company, which spent the last year researching exactly what products it would make, is developing “next-generation” networking devices for telecom carriers such as SBC SNET, according to Reeves. These products would allow carriers to use existing network infrastructure better for new, higher-speed services, rather than build more expensive high-speed networks. The products would be used to collect data, voice and video traffic and send it to high-speed switching networks, Reeves said.
Mangrove is the third high-tech venture Reeves has launched in the last eight years.
In 1995, he and two partners raised $11 million to start Sahara Networks, which developed electronic devices to feed traffic more efficiently into switches used in the high-speed, simultaneous transmission of voice, data and video. Before the company actually sold a single product, Reeves sold Sahara in January 1997 for $212 million.
In 1999, Reeves and another team of partners raised about $30 million in venture capital to form Sirocco Systems, which made switches that take electronic traffic and convert it into light waves that can be sent across an optical network. Sirocco was later sold for $3.8 billion.3
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