Optical-networking provider Big Bear Networks said it has raised $40 million in its second round of private funding. Lead investors for the Series B funding are Austin Ventures and Menlo Ventures.
Other participants in the current round include Oak Investment Partners, as well as original investors Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, which together invested $20 million in Big Bear in June 2000.
Big Bear Networks designs "photronic signal processing" products for next-generation 10- and 40-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) optical carrier equipment, officials said. The company will will announce its product architecture in the first half of this year.
Big Bear, in a statement, said it is developing electro-optical module and subassembly products that remove the physical-layer constraints associated with tapping into and maximizing the bandwidth-transmission capabilities of fiber-optic media. The products will tightly couple previously separate electrical and photonic functions to provide active monitoring and dynamic compensation of the optical data path.
The company's target customers are system vendors supplying the fundamental switching and transmission infrastructure for the public network, including optical switches, DWDM-based SONET/SDH grooming switches, terabit-class IP/MPLS routers and SONET multiplexing and transmission equipment.
Big Bear Networks was founded in June 2000 with an initial core team from Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Texas Instruments, and currently has 75 employees. The company is based in Milpitas, Calif.
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