Software-defined and virtualized networks startup, CENX has secured $12.5 million in a series D funding round led by new investors BDC Capital, Mistral Venture Partners, and VMware. All of the company's current investors, including Verizon Ventures and Ericsson also participated in the funding round.
The funding is intended to accelerate CENX's global market and portfolio expansion in addressing emerging requirements for Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) for service providers that are evolving to Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies.
According to CENX, ever-growing demand for enterprise and consumer cloud-based applications is driving service providers to change the way they operate their networks, and to turn to software systems that support agile service delivery and real-time service assurance. The LSO market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of nearly 60%, reaching $2.7 billion by 2019, according to The Rayno Report, fueled by carrier SDN and NFV markets that are increasing 50-80% annually.
Ed Ogonek, President & CEO of CENX
We welcome the market, business and partnership perspectives that VMware, BDC Capital, and Mistral bring to CENX. We are seeing tremendous demand worldwide for our Cortx solution, delivering tangible value in today's networks and empowering the evolution to virtualized networks and services with NFV and SDN. With the support and confidence of our growing investor group, we continue to expand our world-class team to meet these global opportunities.
David Wright, Vice President, Operations, Telco NFV Group, VMware
CENX shares VMware's vision to deliver innovative solutions for virtualization and cloud computing. With more and more carriers moving to NFV, there is a real need for CENX's high-scale, real-time LSO solutions to ensure high service quality end-to-end across both physical and virtual network infrastructure. We look forward to participating in this industry transformation.
