DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /    ( Table of Contents )

Systems/Enterprise:

VOLTAIRE SECURES $15 MILLION IN FUNDING

Voltaire, a leading provider of high-performance InfiniBand solutions, announced that it has secured $15 million in financing, bringing the company's total funding to date to $50 million. Baker Capital, Pitango Venture Capital and new investor Vertex Venture Capital led the oversubscribed round. Existing investors Platinum Venture Capital, Tamir Fishman Ventures and The Challenge Fund also participated.

"The InfiniBand market has advanced significantly over the past year with support from leading vendors such as IBM, Oracle, SUN, HP, SGI and Apple, and, more importantly, from customers in the high performance computing and enterprise data center markets," said Ashley Leeds, a partner at Baker Capital. "The strong endorsements from Voltaire's prestigious customers and the quality of the company's management team were key factors in our decision to invest in this round."

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Voltaire provides intelligent InfiniBand hardware and software solutions that enable high performance applications to run on distributed server, storage and network resources. The standards-based solutions continue to be adopted by advanced computing facilities and enterprise data centers worldwide to improve the performance and efficiency of server clusters and Grid computing environments. Voltaire's innovative technology and complete scalable InfiniBand switching solution that includes connectivity to IP and Fibre Channel networks has made it the most widely-deployed InfiniBand solution. Voltaire's customers include Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratories, Mississippi State University and Ohio Supercomputer Center. Voltaire opened additional sales and marketing offices in Europe and Asia Pacific last year to address customer demand in those markets.

The InfiniBand market demonstrated tangible growth in 2003 with customers deploying the technology to improve the performance and manageability of Linux server clusters and Grids. Moreover, Oracle and IBM endorsed InfiniBand as an integral component for their Grid and on-demand computing platforms signaling further adoption of the technology by enterprise data centers. According to a recent study by IDC, the market for InfiniBand products in the high performance computing and enterprise data center markets is expected to surpass $750 million in 2006.

"Voltaire has made impressive gains in the high performance computing market over the last year," said Vernon Turner, group vice president of global server solutions at IDC. "It has achieved acceptance by the HPC market based on their complete solution for clustered supercomputers and Grids and is poised to lead the next phase of growth for InfiniBand in the enterprise data center."

"Voltaire has perhaps amassed the largest customer base of any InfiniBand vendor in a significant and growing market," commented Moshe Shahaf, managing partner at Vertex Venture Capital, which joined as a new investor for Voltaire's latest round of financing.

"Voltaire continues to impress us with their ability to execute and deliver innovative solutions that address real customer needs," added Chemi Peres, managing general partner at Pitango Venture Capital.

"The quality of our investors and the speed with which we closed this round sends a clear message to the market that InfiniBand represents a sizable opportunity and that Voltaire is well-positioned to be a market leader," said Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and CEO of Voltaire. "We intend to use this new financing to rapidly grow sales, marketing and customer support initiatives to generate further demand for our products and solutions. We believe that the new funding from this round together with the company's existing cash can carry us to breakeven."