NeoAccel, a pioneering innovator of next-generation Internet security solutions, announced its Series A3 funding round of approximately $4 million led by Baring Private Equity Partners' India Fund (ING’s former venture arm) and existing investors.
At next week’s Interop Las Vegas 2006, NeoAccel will introduce the next generation of its flagship product, SSL VPN-Plus Enterprise Edition Version 2.0.
NeoAccel will use this latest investment to accelerate sales and marketing to become the new leader in the $3.2 billion market for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). In realizing its goal to deliver the world’s fastest VPN, NeoAccel’s SSL VPN-Plus is at the forefront of performance compared with other SSL VPNs and several IPSec VPNs.
With its Series A round complete, NeoAccel will invest in sales and marketing to accelerate broad market acceptance in order to become the new leader in the rapidly growing market for Virtual Private Networks (VPN). The VPN segment has expanded to include a new class of SSL VPNs that provide secure browser-based access to all enterprise applications. NeoAccel’s low-latency, ultra-fast SSL VPN-Plus is at the forefront of the rapidly growing SSL VPN market due to the enterprise-class performance advantages derived from the company’s patent-pending Intelligent Connection Acceleration Architecture™ (ICAA™) and for the exceptional business value of a low/no-administration and highly scalable alternative to conventional IPSec VPNS.
To date, NeoAccel has achieved significant results including numerous customer deployments and a variety of significant OEM and channel alliances in the U.S. and internationally. The company is operating with a very low burn rate and expects to become profitable during the course of its next fiscal year and close its mezzanine funding round soon thereafter.
NeoAccel has progressively enrolled investment backing for its patent-pending secure access and acceleration technologies to help realize their disruptive potential in becoming the best mover in advancing SSL VPNs as IPSec replacements. The Series A3 investment follows earlier Series A2 investments from NTT Leasing and technology angel investors such as Prabhu Goel (Verilog inventor), Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail.com founder) and a Series A1 investment from NextStar Venture, the investment company of Michel Susai, CEO of NeoAccel and founder and former Chairman and CEO of NetScaler (now Citrix® NetScaler).
“Our investment will enable NeoAccel to accelerate broad market adoption of its SSL VPN-Plus as the only network security software platform to overcome the fundamental technology flaw in conventional SSL VPNs that hampers widespread enterprise adoption,” said Subbu Subramaniam, Investment Partner for Baring Private Equity Partners India (BPEP India). “Leveraging the breakthrough innovations and experienced leadership of Michel Susai, NeoAccel has great promise to fulfill the promise of SSL VPNs to unseat IPSec VPNs as the dominant way for securing remote access to enterprise applications networks.”
"We are pleased that this latest investment will enable NeoAccel to bring to market the industry’s first SSL VPN with the potential to become the accepted way for enterprises to provide secure access to their essential applications and networks," said Michel Susai, Chairman and CEO of NeoAccel. "NeoAccel understands the fundamental technology flaw in conventional SSL VPNs. Now, the time is right to show the world that NeoAccel offers much better performance than conventional SSL VPNs and can provide a full-function alternative to conventional IPSec VPNs."
Michel Susai was the founder and former Chairman and CEO of NetScaler, where he invented Request Switching, the fundamental Internet acceleration technology that up to 75 percent of Internet users go through each day to visit the world’s highest-traffic websites, such as Google, MSN, Ticketmaster and MLB.com. NetScaler was acquired in 2005 by Citrix Systems for more than $300 million.
"Although a relatively late entry, NeoAccel is seeking to make up time by capitalizing on a significant fundamental technology flaw with existing SSL VPN products," said Michael Suby, Senior Research Analyst for Stratecast Partners, a Division of Frost & Sullivan. "That technology flaw is apparent in SSL VPN full access methods, resulting in what is known as TCP-over-TCP meltdown in transport networks where congestion is unchecked such as wireless LANs or where packet loss is common across the Internet. NeoAccel’s remedy to these problems is with two NeoAccel-designed technologies that eliminate TCP-over-TCP meltdown and eliminate 70 percent of context switching overhead." |
