Xirrus, Inc. announced that it has secured an additional $20 million in a financing round led by InterWest Partners. This financing round brings the total investment in the company to $80 million. Xirrus will use the new funds to bolster its reserves and strategically invest in partnerships with large integrators focused on making Wi-Fi the primary network connection for their customers. The financing is anticipated to be the last round of private funding Xirrus will require.

“Times have changed since my last technology venture,” said Dirk Gates, founder and CEO of Xirrus (previously founder and CEO of Xircom, which was valued at more than $2.0 billion before being sold to Intel® in 2001). “Xirrus has reached critical mass and significant customer traction with far less fanfare, yet far more substance than venture-backed companies during the 1990’s. We have quietly outpaced the competition by outperforming them on nearly every level – products, productivity and capital efficiency – as evidenced by many thousands of successful deployments, with 100% customer satisfaction, while growing at a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 250% over the past three years.”

Xirrus also announced the appointment of Khaled Nasr, Partner at InterWest Partners, to Xirrus’ board of directors. Mr. Nasr joins current Xirrus board members Dave Marquardt of August Capital; Steve Krausz of US Venture Partners; Eric Young of Canaan Partners; Bill Schroeder, former Vice Chairman of Connor Peripherals; and Dirk Gates, president and CEO. All existing venture investors including August Capital, US Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, and QuestMark Partners participated in the round.

“We have been monitoring the Wi-Fi industry in search of a viable investment for several years, but have been dissatisfied with the lack of differentiation and leadership among the vendors,” said Khaled Nasr, Partner at InterWest. “There was one Wi-Fi vendor, however, who had the leadership, vision, and products we were looking for. Xirrus not only has a management team with proven operational abilities, but they also have the vision and products to take Wi-Fi to the next level – to replace wired Ethernet to the desktop with wireless connectivity.”

About InterWest Partners
InterWest Partners (www.interwest.com), founded in 1979, is a leading diversified venture capital firm focused on building long-term relationships with entrepreneurs and portfolio companies. Currently investing its tenth fund, InterWest X, a $650 million fund, InterWest has raised more than $2.8 billion of capital since inception. InterWest has a total of 13 partners and general partners in Menlo Park, CA and Dallas, TX, who bring together deep domain knowledge in life sciences and information technology.

The firm's past successful investments in information technology include: CIENA (CIEN), Copper Mountain Networks (CMTN), Crystal Semiconductor (acquired by Cirrus Logic, CRUS), Cyrix (CYRX; acquired by National Semiconductor (NSM), Lightera (acquired by CIENA), PlaceWare (acquired by Microsoft, MSFT), SiTera (acquired by Vitesse, VTSS), Silicon Graphics (SGI), Stratacom (STRM; acquired by Cisco, CSCO) and Xilinx (XLNX).

About Xirrus
Xirrus, Inc., is the only Wi-Fi Power Play in the industry and manufactures the High Performance Wi-Fi Array technology, which is the only fully distributed, dense radio Wi-Fi architecture available in the industry today. The innovative Xirrus architecture delivers unmatched RF innovation and wireless performance on a per access point and system-wide basis, yet requires fewer devices, switch ports, cabling, time, and effort to implement and maintain than traditional offerings - accelerating the Time-to-Value by 3X. Xirrus designs and manufactures its products in the USA and is Wi-Fi Alliance, VeriSign, PCI, FIPS 140-2, and ISO 9001:2008 certified. For more information, please visit www.xirrus.com.

Media Contacts:
John Merrill, Xirrus
john.merrill@xirrus.com
805.262.1644

Mandy Kakavas, Horn Group for Xirrus
mandy.kakavas@horngroup.com
415.905.4015

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