Capital Chaos

 Silver Peak Systems (Santa Clara, CA) just added another $21M in financing bringing the total investment in the company to $63 million. The latest round of funding includes investments from Artis Capital Management, Benchmark Capital, Duff Ackerman and Goodrich LLC, Greylock Partners, J. & W. Seligman & Co, and Pinnacle Ventures.

The company is a leading provider of scalable Wide Area Network acceleration solutions.  The new funding will provide working capital to expand all areas of the company’s global business, including engineering, sales, marketing and support.

Silver Peak has some very credible management and was founded by David Hughes (Cisco, Nortel) who has been awarded more than 25 patents for networking related inventions.

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 Benchmark Capital (Menlo Park, CA) is a highly regarded VC that has had its share of successes (eBay, AOL, PageFlakes) but also some not so great investments (Webvan, Tristrata).  These guys are very clear about their opinion of what will work and what wont - and are not afraid to express it.  All of the partners are guys who have both operating and financial experience so be prepared to know your stuff because these are not casual investors at all.  Like most Valley VC’s, they primarily invest in their geographic area.

They typically focus investments in the areas of enterprise software and services, communications & security, semiconductors, mobile computing, consumer services and financial services.  These guys want to be the first investor - not a carry on.  They seem to gravitate towards more early stage and their investment size ranges from $100k to us much as $15M.  Typical investment size is $3-$5M initially and they do support their investments with greater capital if needed/warranted over the life of the company.

Try to pitch Rich Barton if you get the chance,  Young guy with lots of web experience and can be very valuable if he drinks your Kool aid.

Contact:
2480 Sand Hill Road, Suite 200
Menlo Park, California 94025
United States
Telephone: (650) 854 8180