Millimeter-wave network equipment company Pivotal CommWare has raised $50 million in new funding that aims to help the company scale and support midband spectrum along with mmWave bands.
“This capital will allow Pivotal to become a significant 5G telecom infrastructure provider on a global stage,” said Pivotal COO Chris Brandon.
Pivotal said that it plans to use the new funding to expand product support, distribution and research and development for its mmWave products, network modeling tool and Intelligent Beam Management System, and that it also plans to extend its products and services into midband frequencies including the C Band, CBRS spectrum and “other upcoming frequency bands.”
Site densification is the name of the game when it comes to supporting mmWave 5G outdoors and indoors, and signal repeaters and boosters like Pivotal’s are seen as potentially playing a significant role.
The company’s Series C round was led by an affiliate of Tracker Capital Management; Devonshire Investors participated as well, as did existing Pivotal investors including Bill Gates, DIG Investment, Thermo and Lux Capital.
Tracker Capital’s senior advisor Dr. Shaygan Kheradpir will join Pivotal’s board of directors as part of its investment; he formerly served in C-level positions at Verizon (which has utilized Pivotal’s systems), Barclays, Coriant and Juniper Networks.
Kheradpir said in a statement that Pivotal has “cracked the code for mmWave 5G. Their ecosystem is critical to mobile network operators around the world, and to the future of US-based telecom infrastructure. To deliver on the promise of 5G for industrial internet and immersive web, quantum step improvements in throughput, capacity, latency, and precision are required for the new wave of devices and applications. As the world shifts to mobile edge computing, Pivotal delivers a demonstrable competitive advantage for deploying true 5G applications with dramatically improved efficiency and performance.”
Pivotal Board member Kyle Pickens said that the funding “will be used to turbocharge the company’s development.”
