Crescendo Networks Lifts $9M Series C Round

Crescendo Networks Ltd., a maker of appliances for accelerating Web applications, has secured $9.5 million in Series C funding.

New investor Challenge Fund led the round with a $2.5 million investment. The remaining $7 million was provided by existing investors Evergreen Venture Partners, Apax Partners, Magma Venture Partners, StageOne Ventures and Convergent Capital.

The company builds Web application acceleration appliances that offload much of the processing from the Web servers and accelerate individual applications, rather than the entire server, which results in between five and 10 times the performance of its competitors, F5 Networks and Citrix Systems Inc., said Janine Roth, Crescendo's president. Roth declined to disclose her company's valuation.

Crescendo, based in Tel Aviv, sells its AppBeat appliance to media companies, universities and corporations, which use it to speed up the delivery of external and internal applications.

When Magma first seeded the company, "we saw superb architecture and technology which we thought would deliver much better performance than any other product on the market [and that] the market would grow very fast because of the phenomena of the distributed organization," said Modi Rosen, a managing partner with Magma Ventures. "On both dimensions, things are meeting our expectations."

The company, which anticipates revenue around $10 million this year, has landed customers such as Aeropostale Inc., Colgate-Palmolive Co., Friendster Inc. and IAC/Interactive Corp., Roth said.

Crescendo Networks initially launched its products in the Asia-Pacific region, but has spent much of the last year building its U.S. presence. Much of the funding from this round will be used to continue that effort and to expand into Europe, beyond the channel sales it currently has in the region, Roth said.

The company has 75 employees and was founded in 2002. Since that time, it has raised $36.2 million in venture capital.

Crescendo will not make any changes to its board of directors as a result of the round. 

http://www.crescendonetworks.com