Telecommunications vet Matthew Bross has been named chairman and CEO of Compass-EOS, an Israel-based next-gen routing company that counts Comcast Ventures and Cisco Systems among its backers.
Bross, late of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies, succeeds former CEO Gadi Bahat, who “had expressed his wish to pursue new challenges,” the company said. Bross also replaces ex-board chairman Haim Shani, who will remain a board member of Compass-EOS as he begins to manage a newly-created technology-focused private equity fund.
Bross’s move up top comes more than two months after Compass-EOS landed a $42 million round that extended its total to $160 million. IN addition to Comcast Ventures and Cisco, a group of existing investors, including Pitango Venture Capital, Benchmark Capital, Northbridge Venture Partners and Marker LLC, also joined the round.
Focused on software-defined networking (SDN) architectures, Compass-EOS, a company founded in 2006, develops high-speed routers that require less size and power than traditional equipment. It launched the r10004, its first icPhotonics-based router to use an optical chip-to-chip framework, last March.
Bross will manage Compass-EOS from its U.S. and Israel offices.
“Gadi developed a strong team and a great business platform to grow from. The Compass-EOS product line − which is commercially available right now − and its core technology, are game-changing routers that address the market needs for additional bandwidth,” Bross said, in a statement. “The Compass-EOS r10004 is built upon a flexible silicon photonics architecture, the world’s first such shipping technology, and will greatly benefit our customers and their ability to deliver services faster, cheaper and far more efficiently.”
According to his LinkedIn profile, Bross most recently was CEO of IP Partners Ltd, a company that provides advisory and operational development services to Chinese companies seeking to expand into western markets, as well as U.S.-based companies that are pursuing business in China.
Before that, he was the group chief technology officer of China’s Huawei, a company that has lowered its domestic profile amid ongoing mistrust by the U.S. government, and previously served as CTO at both British Telecom and Williams Communications.
