Open-RAN pioneer Mavenir announced this week that it has raised another $100 million, which it will use to extend its AI and automation capabilities.
The fundraising round was led by Siris, a technology focused private equity firm and Mavenir’s largest equity holder, “along with investment from two highly strategic ecosystem partners,” the company said.
Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO of Mavenir, said in a statement on the funding: “This new capital will allow us to accelerate our capabilities in automation, sustainability, and use of AI as we enable our customers to efficiently deploy and operate Open RAN based end-to-end cloud-native networks.
This adds to the $250 million raised by Mavenir last year. That money was described at that time as working capital by CEO Kohli.
Mavenir was founded in 2005 and built a business out of supplying solutions for messaging and voice services like VoLTE. About seven years ago, it started looking at the open radio access network (RAN) space.
At Mobile World Congress this year, John Baker, senior vice president of ecosystem business development at Mavenir told Silverlinings about its deals with Deutsche Telekom, Dish Wireless and Airtel. He noted that Mavenir is supplying all the software to support over 40,000 5G radios on the Dish network.
O-RAN shares
Dell’Oro Group VP and analyst Stefan Pongratz didn’t have any comment on the identity of the ecosystem partners that participated in the latest round of funding. He did note, however, that — even with a funding boost — Mavenir will still have to toil to build its minimal RAN market share up.
“What I can say is that Mavenir has made significant progress in RAN over the past couple of years propelling its global RAN share to grow roughly 4x since 2020,” the analyst said. “At the same time, technology leadership and scale are required to be successful in RAN, and Mavenir still has more work to do to reach its ~1% RAN share target,” Pongratz added.
From a revenue perspective, Pongratz has previously said that Samsung, Fujitsu and NEC were top O-RAN suppliers for 2022.
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