Quantenna Communications, the maker of next-gen WiFi chips, went to the well again, pulling out $22 million in a round led by Centerview Capital Technology, Vivint and NTT Group.
All major existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Rusnano, Sigma Partner and Venrock, also participated. Quanntenna, founded in 2006, has raised $166 million so far, according to CrunchBase data.
Tied to the new round, Ned Hooper, an exec late of Cisco Systems and now a founding partner of Centerview; and Harold Hughes, late of Intel and Rambus, were named to the Quantenna board.
Quantenna said it will use the funds to invest more in technology and customer-facing activities. Its customers include AT&T, DirecTV, Orange and Telefonica. Qualcomm and Broadcom are among Quantenna's competitors.
Quantenna has been focusing on 802.11ac, sometimes called Gigabit WiFi, which will help to shore up in-home wireless backbones and other types of WiFi access points. Earlier this year, it claimed its “wave 2” 802.11ac chip hit usable throughputs of 1.3 Gbps,with Physical Layer throughputs of 1.7 Gbps.
