Airvine Secures $7,000,000 in Seed Funding for Its Wireless Freeway

December 16, 2020 — Santa Clara, CA — Today Airvine announced a final Seed financing round with Valley Capital Partners and Orbit Venture Partners, bringing total financing to $7 million.  In conjunction with the Seed financing, Steve O’Hara of Valley Capital Partners has joined Airvine’s board of directors.

Airvine has also emerged as the winner of the Best Enterprise Wi-Fi Solution at the Wi-Fi NOW industry award ceremony. “Wi-Fi NOW is the leading consulting, advocacy, and media organization in the wireless space. It is a huge honor to win this award. The judges are well-regarded analysts from throughout the industry, and it is great to see that our value proposition has been broadly recognized” said Vivek Ragavan, CEO of Airvine.

Airvine is developing an entirely new class of wireless technology that utilizes unlicensed spectrum in the V-band (57 to 71 GHz in the U.S.) to backhaul enterprise voice and data traffic. The legacy approach to in-building backhaul has always been to use copper cabling. CAT5 was broadly deployed back before the turn of the century, with CAT6 (and soon CAT7) being deployed today. The legacy approach made sense when the goal was to bring wired connectivity to every cubicle in an office building, but those days are long gone. Wi-Fi is now the dominant access technology as it allows the network to support a mobile workforce, but to get the most out of a wireless network a backhaul architecture is required that installs quickly, has the needed throughput, and can easily support moves, adds, and changes. Airvine’s WaveTunnel technology will usher in a new era of the all-wireless enterprise.

Company founder and Chairman of the Board, Hatch Graham, “We are delighted to have completed the seed funding round, which allows us to finish product development and start commercial trials with enterprise accounts from a variety of industry verticals. Our focus is on forward-looking companies that are interested in a more flexible and cost-effective approach that will increase business agility.”

Steve O’Hara said, “We are excited to be part of the Airvine journey. Wireless has long dominated the access space and is now set to take its place as a major backhaul technology. We are always looking for disruptive technologies, and we believe that Airvine is uniquely positioned to change the enterprise backbone industry in a big way.”

Vivek Ragavan, CEO added, “We are very pleased with the team that we are pulling together. It consists of world-class networking and RF experts from across the industry and we are driving rapidly toward product availability in 2021.”

The Big Idea behind Airvine is that the major changes in access networks will require major changes in the backhaul infrastructure that supports these networks. Wi-Fi 6 (and very soon 6E) provide an enormous capacity increase that is way beyond what legacy copper cabling can support. These old networks will need to be replaced with a broadband solution capable of backhauling tens of gigabits/sec. It’s not just Wi-Fi that needs backhauling, the industry is also set to embrace private in-building 5G cellular networks. These wireless access technologies will sweep through enterprise accounts worldwide and will have a major impact on the structured cabling market, which is valued at $7.5 billion a year worldwide.