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Lane15 Lines Up $12M

Lane15 Software has secured $12 million in second-round funding, an amount that the startups CEO says will keep it afloat until InfiniBand -- a market that has taken longer to develop than many in the industry expected -- hits volume in 2003.

“The strategy in terms of what we raised and how we plan to spend it is to support the company until [InfiniBand] becomes a volume market,” says Alisa Nessler, Lane15’s president and CEO.

Lane15, based in Austin, Texas, is creating management software for InfiniBand -- short for "infinite bandwidth" -- a scaleable switched-fabric interconnect technology for servers and storage. The company’s latest funding round has come at a critical point if it is to live to see InfiniBand widely adopted. Analysts expect InfiniBand products, which have received tremendous industry support, to start appearing in the market in late 2002 (see InfiniBand Steals the Show).

New investors in Lane15 include Index Ventures, Quanta Computer Inc. (a Taiwanese notebook PC manufacturer), and Convergent Investors, an Austin VC. Also contributing to the round were some of Lane15's previous investors: AV Labs, Austin Ventures, Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), Intel Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. [Disclosure: Lightspeed is an investor in Light Reading Inc., publisher of Byte and Switch.]

“We’re looking at spending this Series B round in market development and market deployment, working with partners and preparing ourselves for the volume ramp in 2003,” Nessler says. She adds that Lane15, which currently has fewer than 50 employees, will be staffing up somewhat in the new year.

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