Intune expects to release new product next year
Telecoms equipment developer Intune Networks expects to release its product to market next year and record its first full year of revenues in 2011, after securing a €22 million round of investment funding last week.
John Dunne, co-founder and chief marketing officer, said that the funding meant that the company could now proceed with a full commercial launch next year.
While Intune has raised approximately €50 million in funding to date from backers, Dunne predicted that the company was likely to record revenues that were multiples of this amount. The typical investment made by telecoms companies in the type of network upgrade facilitated by Intune’s technology was in the order of $10 million, he said.
Intune’s latest funding round was the largest private equity investment in the global telecoms optical equipment sector and the third largest in the European IT sector this year. While the amount of money raised is considerable, Dunne said that this was the ‘‘type of money it takes to bring a telecoms grade product across the line’’. While the deal size is unusual for Ireland, it was ‘‘a typical play in Silicon Valley’’, he said.
Dunne and his co-founder Tom Farrell established the company in 1999 and prior to that spent several years at UCD researching tuneable lasers, the technology that underpins Intune product offering. Dunne said that the use of tuneable lasers allows telecoms companies to built a system that responds to unpredictable traffic demands.
With telecoms firms now building next generation networks (NGNs) that will combine voice and data traffic, the need for such technology is set to increase, Dunne said. Not only could it help reduce the cost of such networks by avoiding the need for overbuilding, it could also act as a performance differentiator for telecoms firms who market themselves on the basis of quality of service.
The most recent funding round sees financier Dermot Desmond and venture capital firm Kernel Capital come on board as new investors in the company. Also participating in the round were existing investors, who include Barry Maloney’s Balderton Capital, Amadeus Capital, Spark Capital as well as long-term private investors. Enterprise Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland also provided backing.
The company was to close the funding round in the first quarter of this year, but Dunne said that the current economic climate had slowed the process somewhat. ‘‘The reason we did close it is down to the strength of the customer base and the need for the product. Internet traffic is doubling every two years,” he said.
