Cranberry start-up Netronome Systems has doubled in size, is hiring 25 people in sales, marketing and software and hardware engineering, and has signed a technology licensing agreement with Intel.
Netronome, founded in 2003, is a leading developer of high-performance intelligent networking solutions, building embedded software and hardware components that are sold to large enterprise IT corporations. The agreement allows Netronome to further develop Intel’s popular IXP28XX product line of network processors.
“The Intel license allows us to go off and build the next generation version of that chip,” says Jarrod Siket, senior vice president of sales and marketing. “All evolutions to date have been about speed. We’re now at a junction where speed needs a special layer of high-level intelligence, the highest performance in intelligence processing. We’re another successful feather in the cap of the Pittsburgh high-tech industry.”
As Siket explains it, Netronome technology helps to eliminate massive congestion on the Internet through the construction of a more efficient and faster network. It’s analogous to taking a one-lane dirt road and expanding it into an exponentially increasing superhighway system, he says.
The firm, located close to the site of the former Fore Systems, employs a number of former Fore employees. Netronome received a $20M round of venture capital funding in November of 2006, which allowed for continued R&D and the doubling of its workforce from 25 to 79 employees. Netronome expects to be at 92 by the year end, Siket says.
The Pittsburgh Technology Collaborative helped with early funding.
Writer: Deb Smit
Source: Jarrod Siket, Netronome