NFWare, a resident startup of the Skolkovo Foundation that develops network software that enables the high-speed processing of internet traffic, has raised $2 million in venture funding, the IT company said in a statement Thursday.
The round was led by Sistema Venture Capital fund, with participation from existing investors including Maxfield Capital and Almaz Capital VC funds as well as Wayra, the accelerator of Telefonica Open Future. Skolkovo’s investment service acted as the consultant for the deal.
The NFWare team, from left to right: Alexander Britkin, Igor Ryzhov and Pavel Ivashchenko. Photo: Sk.ru.
NFWare’s software-based networking technology significantly increases network speed for high-load traffic processing. It runs on standard x86 servers and handles the traffic at the speed of the most expensive network hardware from leading vendors: NFWare solutions enable a throughput of up to 200 Gigabits per second on single virtual machine on internet-mix traffic. The technology helps operators to reduce their network infrastructure costs by up to 70%, the company says.
“The volume of traffic in the world is growing exponentially,” Alexey Katkov, Sistema_VC president, said in the press release. “Telecom operators, internet companies and data centres have to continuously invest in enhancing the capacity of their network infrastructure. NFWare offers a technologically elegant and effective solution, making it possible to significantly reduce corporate costs and increase the speed of traffic processing.”
The company says its technology is becoming increasingly in demand, and now plans to strengthen its market position in Europe and expand to the U.S. market.
“Virtualization technologies will become a foundation for building the next generation network infrastructure, where 5G and the Internet of Things will be the key drivers for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in the telecom industry,” said Alexander Britkin, CEO and co-founder of NFWare.
“NFWare was born [in 2014] out of the Applied Research Centre for Computer Networks created with a grant from Skolkovo, which has already developed several innovative technologies used in separate projects – we’ll be hearing more about them in the near future,” Igor Bogachev, head of Skolkovo’s IT cluster, told Sk.ru.
“NFWare was awarded a minigrant from Skolkovo of 5 million rubles at an early stage of its development, which was used to create a prototype of its solution,” he added.
Maxfield Capital, Almaz Capital and Telefonica previously invested in NFWare in 2015, the same year it received a grant from Skolkovo. Last month, NFWare announced a contract with the Russian internet giant Mail.Ru Group: one of the five largest internet sites, based on the number of total pages viewed by comScore.
The startup’s technology has been tried and tested in projects for major telecom companies including Telefonica and Rostelecom. Last year, the startup won the Challenge Up! contest organized by Deutsche Telekom, Intel and Cisco.
“NFWare brilliantly handles one of operators' largest issues – network stress, triggered by significant increase in data use – by providing technology-driven network software,” said Alexander Turkot, a managing partner at Maxfield Capital.
“NFWare is a great example of how science-intensive companies are gaining momentum across the globe. This year we're looking forward to seeing some of the world's tech giants among NFWare's clients,” he added.
The startup is a graduate of Wayra, Telefonica's accelerator, and has offices in Russia, Spain and the United States.