Innovium raises $50 million for networking chips in data centers

Innovium has raised $50 million in funding across two rounds to develop networking infrastructure products for next-generation data centers. The company is disclosing those rounds for the first time.

The company’s products are designed to help companies deal with a bunch of trends, such as the continued adoption of mobile, video, anything-as-a-service (XaaS), big data analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT, or making everyday objects smart and connected).

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San Jose, California-based Innovium first raised a round of funding in the first quarter of 2015 in a round led by venture capital firms Walden Riverwood Ventures and Capricorn Investment Corp., with participation from S-Cubed and Qualcomm. Later in 2015, the company raised more money from Greylock Partners and existing investors.

Board members include Asheem Chandna of Greylock, Dipender Saluja of Capricorn, Lip-Bu Tan of Walden International, and Mark Stevens of S-Cubed.

Innovium believes that the meteoric explosion of data requires a grounds-up approach to high performance Ethernet networking.

“Innovium is laser-focused on developing revolutionary semiconductor solutions to meet our customers’ most critical needs. We are delighted to receive top-tier investor support towards this mission,” said Rajiv Khemani, CEO of Innovium, in a statement.

Khemani was previously chief operating officer at Cavium Networks, a multi-core chip maker that went public. And Puneet Agarwal, chief technology officer, led Broadcom’s technology development of multiple generations of data center switches, including Trident and Tomahawk.

“They’ve got a very experienced team that is developing products in a market that is dominated by some very large players,” said Quinn Li, vice president and global head of Qualcomm Ventures, in an interview with VentureBeat. “They are working on a different architecture that we believe is differentiated.”

Innovium isn’t talking about what it’s building yet. The company says its engineering and executive team came from companies including Broadcom, Cavium, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Intel, and Juniper.

“Domain knowledge and strong execution track record are critical to the success of any new venture. Innovium’s team members have delivered successful products widely deployed in a range of infrastructure applications across the world. With a clean-sheet design, we believe that Innovium can deliver a truly compelling solution,” said Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of Walden International, in a statement.

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Asheem Chandna, partner at Greylock Partners, said in a statement that Innovium has put together one of the industry’s “strongest Ethernet switching teams.”