Silver Peak Snares $21M

WAN optimization specialist Silver Peak's coffers are bulging, thanks to $21 million in funding to support its global expansion.

The Series D round, which included Artis Capital Management, Benchmark Capital, Duff Ackerman, and Pinnacle Ventures, brings Silver Peak's total funding to $63 million.

"We're going to spend this money on a number of things, with the biggest emphasis being sales and global support, along with engineering," says Jeff Aaron, Silver Peak's vice president of marketing.

The secretive startup is still keeping much of its corporate information, such as headcount and revenue figures, closely under wraps, although Aaron told Byte and Switch that some of the Series D will be used for global expansion.

"At the moment, the largest growth is in the U.S. and Europe, but you will definitely see us expanding into other areas as well," he says. "We have some deployments in Asia, but you will see expansions in areas such as Japan and India, for example."2008 also promises to be a busy year for Silver Peak on the product side, and the startup's CEO Rick Tinsley recently revealed plans for a high-speed, high-end enterprise device.

The as-yet-unnamed device will offer gigabit-per-second throughput as Silver Peak continues to wield capacity as a cudgel against rivals such as Riverbed and Blue Coat, which overhauled its client software earlier this week..

"While many WAN optimization vendors are focused on things like clients, were going to stay focused on scale," explains Aaron, adding that a number of big-name firms, including Texas Instruments, Ernst & Young, and AT&T, have already deployed Silver Peak's NX devices.

The startup is nonetheless nowhere near rival Riverbed in terms of customer numbers. Although Silver Peak has "well over" 100 customers, according to Aaron, this is somewhat dwarfed by Riverbed's 3,000-plus customers.

The exec also denied rumors that today's funding announcement was caused by Silver Peak running out of money. "No, it had to do with the fact that the time was right to do it," he says. "The market is hot now and we're experiencing excellent growth."Despite the fact that Silver Peak is still in the red, Aaron thinks that, at this stage, another funding round is unlikely. "We're not profitable yet. Obviously, today's funding should get us to that point," he says. "There's no expectation that we will be raising another round, but you never know."

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