Chelsio announces $17M financing

CHELSIO ANNOUNCES $17M FINANCING

SUNNYVALE, CA – November 16, 2009 – Chelsio Communications Inc., the leading provider of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) adapters, ASICs, and storage solutions, today announced the completion of a private funding round, raising a total of $17 million.  The funding is from existing investors, including New Enterprise Associates, INVESCO Private Capital, Investor Growth Capital, LSI Corporation, NTT Finance, Vendanta Capital, Abacus Capital Group, Pacesetter Capital Group, Horizon Ventures, and one new participant, Mobile Internet Capital.

According to Chelsio president and CEO Kianoosh Naghshineh, the new funding will be used for continued development of Chelsio’s 10GbE adapter products, and expansion into new markets.  Powered by its 3rd generation Terminator (T3) ASIC, Chelsio’s portfolio of unified wire adapters enable 10Gb Ethernet to replace niche fabric technologies such as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand in a wide range of applications, including Network-Attached Storage (NAS) filers, Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays, Server Adapters, High Performance Cluster Computing, Blade Servers, Video Servers, Application Servers and Web Accelerators.

With more than 150 different platform wins and 700 different OEM and end user customers, Chelsio’s cut-through T3 architecture is now established as a reference in many storage, clustering, virtualization, and networking applications.  With the revenues increasing by more than 25% each quarter for the past few quarters, and with a strong sales funnel, this financing is expected to take the company to profitability.

Thanks to our great customers and the persistence and confidence of our investors, Chelsio has now crossed the chasm from a start-up to a reliable long term supplier in this space, said Naghshineh. This new capital not only allows us to continue our technology leadership with our unified wire adapters and build on the success of T3 with the addition of FCoE, CEE, SR-IOV, and other protocols, but also allows us to go into new markets with our storage software and appliance products to provide an end to end solution to our customers.

About Chelsio Communications, Inc.
Chelsio Communications is leading the convergence of networking, storage and clustering interconnects with its robust, high-performance and proven unified wire, storage software and appliance technology.  Featuring a highly scalable and programmable architecture, Chelsio is shipping 10-Gigabit Ethernet and multi-port Gigabit Ethernet adapter cards, delivering the low latency and superior throughput required for high-performance computing applications.  For more information, visit the company online at www.chelsio.com.

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