Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Vanu taps VCs for $32M funding

By Mass High Tech Staff

Software radio maker Vanu Inc. of Cambridge has raised a new round of venture capital worth $32 million, according to company officials.

The new round involved funding from Norwest Venture Partners of California and Tata Capital of India, along with previous investor Charles River Ventures. The funding is for general working capital purposes and will be used to expand the company both in the U.S. and abroad, said Andy Beard, chief strategy officer for Vanu.

Charles River Ventures led Vanu’s $8 million Series A round for Vanu in July of 2007, which included existing stockholders and directors of the company. In November 2007, Vanu teamed up with Lowell chip maker BitWave Semiconductor Inc. to demonstrate a new femtocell device aimed at using the 700 megahertz spectrum, a portion of the wireless spectrum.

Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Networks Communications Council named the Vanu Anywave software-based radio base station from Vanu as its Product of the Year. The Anywave is designed to scale up or down to deliver RF coverage for outdoor large-scale urban and rural; outdoor mid-scale cell for high traffic gap fills; indoor picocell coverage for enterprises; and femtocell coverage for residential and mobile cell sites for disaster recovery.

The company was founded by namesake Vanu Bose, who was named a Mass High Tech All-Star in 2003.

As part of the financing, Promod Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners will join Vanu’s board of directors.