WiMAX vendor Soma scores $51 M in financing
Too late to call the company for more info, but we did want to note that San Francisco WiMax gear vendor Soma Networks announced Friday that it had secured a new $51 million round of financing, from investors including Daiwa Securities Group, Ridgeway Capital Partners and others.
Soma, whose executives we interviewed as part of our Sidecut Report on WiMax, had told us they would be seeking additional funding to help the company fulfill its big WiMax contract with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), India’s state-owned telecommunications company. The deal with BSNL was announced earlier this year.
For WiMax followers, Soma’s a pretty interesting company — they have been around almost 10 years, starting with wireless mesh technologies before finding their way to WiMax. Privately held, Soma had previously raised around $200 million in financing, but needed a boost to start fulfilling the big BSNL deal.
So what does the investment round say about WiMax? Here’s a quick excerpt from our Sidecut Report on WiMax that quotes company exec Tom Flak:
For several players in the WiMax market, the overnight sensation is something that has been years in the making. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this market to arrive,” said Tom Flak, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of operations at WiMax gear provider Soma Networks of San Francisco. Flak said that Soma, like other WiMax infrastructure players, is bullish on the near-term future, as standards firm up and production prices go down. End-user equipment, Flak said, is now about “half the price” of pre-standard WiMax gear, which should lead to a lot of WiMax activity in 2008. “With WiMax, you can stop wondering if the technology is viable,” Flak said. “It’s really market-share grabbing time.”
Sounds like the investors in Soma’s new round are doing some market-grabbing themselves. Not a surprise to anyone who has read our report, which offered the following as one of its conclusions:
If WiMax delivers on service providers’ plans of being cheap, easy and pervasive, then there are big opportunities today for venture investors, businesses, application and device developers, as well as infrastructure and service-provider players, who still have time to get in ahead of the mass-market adoption part of the curve.
Soma’s other interesting angle is that they are the equipment provider for AT&T’s hush-hush WiMax network in Pahrump, Nev. Want to know more WiMax inside stuff? Order the report.
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