Mobile broadband gateway provider Stoke snags $15M in VC

Mobile broadband gateway provider Stoke announced it has received $15 million in fully subscribed Series D funding, bringing the company's total funding to date to more than $65 million. This latest round will be used to support its installed base and commercial carrier trials.

The company provides a common IP session management over a range of network access technologies. According to company President and CEO Vikash Varma, Stoke is looking to extend the life of 3G networks, helping operators adequately manage the influx of data traffic driven by smartphones and laptops. That may be accomplished by offloading traffic onto femtocells, WiFi or another network such as WiMAX. Stoke's seamless multi-network access solution is designed to enable this offload in a way that allows a continuous session without requiring additional network hardware. Moreover, the vendor said it can enable Internet APN offload capability, whereby deep packet inspections are made to divert data traffic that is destined for the Internet directly to the Internet, without requiring that traffic to travel to an operator's core network.

Varma said Stoke will be announcing carrier deals during the next several weeks. It may be safe to assume some of these announcements will occur in Japan as Stoke's latest round of financing for the first time includes an investment from Net One Systems, a top networking and systems integration provider in Japan. Also included in this round of financing are existing investors Reliance Technology Ventures Limited (RTVL), the corporate venture capital arm of the Reliance ADA Group, DAG Ventures, Integral Capital Partners, Pilot House Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

For more:
- check out this release [1]

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