Blaze Network Products Wins $10 Million in First Round of Venture Capital Funding

Optical networking company Blaze Network Products Inc. (Dublin, CA) has received $10 million in venture capital funding. Lead investors were Wasserstein Adelson Ventures L.P., the venture capital arm of Wasserstein Perella Group (New York), and Dynafund Ventures (Los Angeles). Intel Corp. and Vanguard Venture Partners also invested.

According to Brian Peters, president of Blaze, this round of investment will help the company expand its high-volume, high-precision manufacturing facility and augment its ASIC design capabilities. The company's engineering team will continue to develop new technologies that enable higher bandwidth for short-haul premises networks. In addition, the investment will help Blaze provide its customers with a reliable, high-performance, continuous-delivery supply chain.

Blaze is developing a fiber optic transceiver that uses wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) techniques to improve the distance and capacity of multimode fiber (MMF). The transceiver extends the distance over which Gigabit Ethernet may be transmitted on multimode fiber to two kilometers. A second WDM product enables trunking of as many as eight Gigabit data streams onto one fiber.