Top firms pour funds into Juniper

Electronic News, Sept 8, 1997 by Carol Haber

Mountain View, Calif.--Another startup is moving into the Internet arena--this one backed with $56 million in total--including $40 million from its third and latest funding round.

Participating in the most recent funding for Juniper Networks are: Ericsson, a provider of fixed and mobile networks; Nortel (Northern Telecom), a provider of digital networking solutions; data networking giant 3Com Corp.; the Siemens/Newbridge Alliance, a specialist in ATM solutions for network service providers; and Worldcom Inc.'s subsidiary, UUNET Technologies, Inc., a major Internet service firm.

"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 devices that can scale to match the rapidly increasing bandwidth available from today's fiber optic networks," said Juniper Chairman/CEO Scott Kriens in a statement. "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."

While Juniper has no product announced as yet--that is slated for the end of 1997 and throughout 1998--it is in the throes of manufacturing high-performance networking devices offering "very high-end" solutions for the Internet, "a solution for the Internet core to make it scale better in both bandwidth and reliability," said director of marketing Joe Furgerson to Electronic News. The devices will be located within the Internet core, so Internet service firms would be major customers. The first product is "very ASIC driven," and is fully capable of transporting TCP/IP protocol. No other specifics were given.

"This is a very significant funding round," said Mr. Furgerson. "It will allow us to complete production and go to market. The technology is usable in a variety of ways. If the Internet core is able to run faster, it is a fundamentally market-enabling opportunity for all other parts of the wide-area-network (WAN), be it sonic multiplexers or ATM switches or various types of access devices for WANs."

The latest funding round for Juniper brings total investment to $56 million. Prior rounds included seed money of $2 million in early 1996 from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; and a second round drawing from a combination of equity and lease financing. Other investors include New Enterprise Associates; Benchmark Capital; Crosspoint Venture Partners; and Institutional Venture Partners.

In addition to ownership interests, participating companies have the opportunity to integrate Juniper's technology with 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's technology around the world," said Mr. Kriens.

Juniper, which is debt free except for the lease financing aspect, has a management team drawn from a slew of big name companies. A former founder and VP of sales and operations at StrataCom, Mr. Kriens is chairman/CEO. At StrataCom, Mr. Kriens spearheaded the sale of Frame Relay and ATM networks to carriers. The CFO is Marcel Gani who has served as VP/CFO of Grand Junction Networks, Primary Access and NeXT Computer, as well as 12 years at Intel Corp. Peter Wexler is VP of engineering and a former VP of engineering at Bay Networks. Both Joe Furgerson, director of marketing at Juniper, 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.

Juniper was founded by three 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, it is said, 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.