Finesco Growth Fund helps Cloudstreet secure €2.6M in 2nd round of private equity
PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Investments will Accelerate Global Market Rollout of the Company’s 5G-Ready Network Slicing / Capacity Orchestration Platform and Revolutionize Mobile Networks
Helsinki, Finland, December 8th, 2016 - /PRNewswire/ Cloudstreet, the Nokia spin-off specialized in delivering SLA-assured mobile Internet connectivity on-demand is pleased to announce that it has secured both its second round of private VC equity of €1Million and a grant from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 (H2020) SME Instrument, Phase 2 of €1.6M. The close of the 2nd VC round with principle investors VersoVentures introduces a new equity partner, Helsinki-based Finesco Capital to the family. The public funding grant from the H2020 SME Instrument, along with earlier public grants, brings this combined public/private round to €2.6M and total Cloudstreet investments to date to €3.2M.
These investments come at an ideal time for Cloudstreet’s market-ready technology, and at a critical time for the telecom industry as it looks to agile innovators help breach the many hurdles of delivering on the promise of telecom’s 5th Generation. Cloudstreet’s patented core technology, the Dynamic Profile Controller™ (DPC™) provides a precisely modular, scalable, software defined solution to address the connectivity needs of multiple customer segments within the heralded framework of Network Slicing.
Horizon 2020 is the EU’s largest research and innovation fund, overseeing a budget of some €80Billion to nurture and support breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts and take “great ideas from the lab to the market”. Focused on bringing disruptive technologies to market, H2020’s SME Instrument will provide Cloudstreet the necessary resources, support and runway to accelerate the full-scale global commercialization of its Dynamic Profile Controller™ (DPC™) solution worldwide. The European Union’s recognition of Cloudstreet provides one of the world’s strongest endorsements of a company, its technology and global market potential.
On the private equity side, following its critical first seed round of Venture Capital lead by Finland’s VersoVentures, Finesco’s contribution helps to put Cloudstreet on solid track toward full-scale global market penetration.
“We are thrilled to have been recognized by these venture capital investors and a world-leading market force like the EU in our pursuit of a better, faster, smarter and more user-centric mobile network”, said Skarp, Founder & CTO of Cloudstreet. “Now past the proof of concept phase, and with the many barriers to full-scale market entry out of the way, Cloudstreet is today, with the help of Verso, Finesco and Horizon 2020, poised to deliver on the promise of 5G well in advance of its arrival.”
“Cloudstreet embodies precisely the target innovators that today’s public private equity investors seek to discover, support and promote,” said Mika Suomela of VersoVentures. “Their solution not only addresses the immediate challenges of capacity management and monetization faced by mobile operators, but provides the kind of modular, flexible, software-defined approach that allows for the arrival of virtually infinite new solutions and business models at very low costs. We look forward to continue working closely with Cloudstreet to make this mission a reality.”
“We were immediately impressed with Cloudstreet’s demonstrated solution and their approach to the rapidly evolving mobile space,” said Ari Siponmaa of Finesco Capital. “The proposed go-to-market plan models the roll out of proven network technologies that will, for the first time, allow mobile operators and service providers to empower users to control capacity and performance of the network connections they use. We’re excited to be taking part in these important developments and the collective mission of establishing the world’s first application-aware network.”
The Cloudstreet DPC™ identifies the precise data need for each mobile-internet connected device or application on-the-fly and enables instant and fully-automated network optimisation to serve each end-user’s precise data requirements at any particular moment, without affecting other network users’ connections. This will be a new paradigm in mobile network management. We can guarantee 99.99% service reliability for all end-users in mobile networks and ensure an uninterrupted connection for even the most data-demanding tasks. This means no more lag or lost connections during movie streaming, video calls or for critical IoT networks.
Further reinforcing the importance of Cloudstreet’s innovations for mobile telecom, the company was this week recognized as the Best Connectivity Solution by the World Communications Awards.
About Horizon 2020
Horizon 2020 is the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe's global competitiveness.
Seen as a means to drive economic growth and create jobs, Horizon 2020 has the political backing of Europe’s leaders and the Members of the European Parliament. They agreed that research is an investment in our future and so put it at the heart of the EU’s blueprint for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth and jobs.
About Finesco
Finesco Capital is an early growth stage VC-fund able to take advantage of the equity gap between seed investors and later stage VC- or PE-investors targeting more mature companies. Finesco’s aim is to open up the international markets to ambitious companies thus the fund’s focus will be in knowledge intensive related businesses. Our team is serving over 20 boards for both listed and unlisted growth companies, we've been involved in over 150 successful investment rounds, fund raisings, restructurings and exits. We've raised over 500M€ growth capital for SME companies. Find out more at http://www.finesco.fi/
About VersoVentures
VersoVentures is a private equity company that creates international growth companies by spinning off businesses that are not living up to their full potential under current ownership or in the current operational environment. Other typical new growth opportunities are non-core subsidiaries or joint ventures, or non-core businesses acquired as part of M&A transactions. Find out more at http://www.versoventures.com
About Cloudstreet’s Dynamic Profile Controller™ (DPC™)
An integrated carrier platform for assured mobile bandwidth delivery on-demand, Cloudstreet’s Dynamic Profile Controller™ (DPC™) is the world’s first carrier-grade platform to deliver SLA-assured quality-of-experience for mobile broadband users. The DPC™ enables a world of application-aware networks to support OTT content, Internet of Things (IoT), wearable healthtech, M2M and 100% availability for public security applications like body cameras and smart vehicles.
The DPC™ provides an elegant solution for mobile telecom’s greatest problem and a clear path to the promise of 5G telecommunications. Driving new revenues from premium quality-assured connectivity, carriers can rapidly deploy and scale new services for differentiated consumer and business segments, while aligning and practices of Net Neutrality.
About Cloudstreet
Founded in 2010, Cloudstreet is a cloud based service platform for telecom operators, combining business and network layer technologies to provide context specific bandwidth-on-demand, first developed at Nokia’s Silicon Valley campus.
Aligned with the principles of net-neutrality, Cloudstreet directly addresses the need for operators to manage the delivery of customer-oriented, application-aware quality-of-service within their networks, while ensuring an open and equal access Internet.
Cloudstreet is provisioned to users based on the dynamic details of an application-specific profile to deliver highly personalized services dynamically, while effectively balancing network traffic and data demand. From streaming HD Video-on-Demand to data-intensive apps and the emerging Internet-of-Things, Cloudstreet bridges the gap between the digital services we all use, need and enjoy and the network infrastructure that serves them.
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