Henry Kressel and Frank
Brochin to join Board of Directors of
optical networking
company started by industry veterans
New York, NY -- August 13, 2001 --
Q-Optics, a communications infrastructure company that is setting the ultimate
standard for high speed provisioning of optical networks, announced today the
closing of its Series A investment round led by global private equity firm
Warburg Pincus. The company is developing technology to enable real-time
peering management of optical circuits across multiple carrier and multiple
vendor networks. The investor group also included The Hatch Group, Brobeck
Phleger & Harrison, Taylor Winfield, Collaborative Capital, well regarded
angel investors, and Q-Optics’ founding investor VenturiFX.
“We are very excited to back the
founding management team of Q-Optics,” stated Frank Brochin, Managing Director
at Warburg Pincus. “We believe the company is targeting on a massive
opportunity in the optical networking space and their solutions will have a
significant impact on the cost infrastructures and revenue opportunities of the
global service provider community.”
Alex Mashinsky, Chairman and Chief
Technology Architect of Q-Optics added, “In today’s constrained capital
markets, it has become more important than ever for carriers in the core,
metro, and access markets to enhance their profitability by working with one
another to provide true real-time access to services while eliminating the
costs associated with manual provisioning. Our technology will provide a
real-time operating system that allows seamless interoperability and real-time
mediation between customers, applications, and the myriad of hardware
configurations around the global optical network”
Clive Cook, Q-Optics’ CEO
concluded, “We are extremely pleased to have Warburg Pincus as our financial
sponsors. They have an unparalleled track record in working with founding
management teams to create value and build industry leaders like BEA Systems
and Veritas, and we look forward to a long and rewarding partnership as we
build out Q-Optics together.”
Founders
Q-Optics was founded by Alex
Mashinsky, Chairman and Chief Technology Architect, Jeff Parness, now serving
as Corporate Marketing Manager, and Clive Cook, who joined as CEO in January
2001.
Mr. Mashinsky, a serial
entrepreneur in the communications industry, is best known as the leading
evangelist of the bandwidth-trading concept and as founder of
Arbinet-thexchange, the world's leading real-time exchange for global
telecommunications capacity. Today, Arbinet connects 150 of the world's leading
carriers who buy, sell, and deliver voice capacity to one another's networks in
a fully automated, Nasdaq-style trading environment with full financial
settlement and risk management supported by GE Capital. Mr. Mashinsky is also a
co-founder of Comgates, a spin out of Arbinet based in Herzeliya Israel that is
emerging as a leader in the softswitch space.
Mr. Parness, formerly principal of
IPO Associates, was the first Director of Investor Relations at IDT Corporation
(NYSE:IDT), a leading provider of international telecommunications services and
the parent company of Net2Phone (Nasdaq:NTOP), the world's leading Internet
telephony company. Working with Mr. Mashinsky since January 1999, Mr. Parness
helped Arbinet to raise its first $77 million in venture capital financing.
Mr. Cook has a deep technical and
business background along with the hands-on operational experience required to
successfully build Q-Optics. Mr. Cook began his career as an engineer at Nortel
where he was involved in the development of the first SONET OC-12 transport
node. He later was a product manager for the leading telecommunications
equipment-testing manufacturer TTC, now Acterna, where he led TTC’s first
efforts in SNMP network management. Working for Mercer Management Consulting,
Mr. Cook worked on a broad array of projects in a number of industries
including telecommunications, energy, biotechnology, and information
technology. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Cook was also the COO of Patagon, the
Latin America online brokerage sold in March 2000 for $750 million to BSCH, a
unit of Banco Santandar.
Over the past 30 years, Warburg
Pincus has become one of the leading private equity and venture capital firms
in the world. The firm has invested over $11 billion in over 400 companies in
29 countries, providing equity capital across the life cycle of the enterprise,
from start-up through growth financings, and including acquisitions and
restructurings. Working in partnership with management teams, Warburg Pincus
has taken an active role in building businesses such as BEA Systems
(Nasdaq:BEAS) and Veritas (Nasdaq:VRTS).
(www.warburgpincus.com)
About Q-Optics
Founded in June 2000, Q-Optics is
developing technology to enable real-time provisioning of optical circuits
across multiple carriers and multiple vendors on different networks. The company’s
technology is designed to enable short term, unscheduled provisioning of optical
network capacity across heterogeneous core, metro, access, and local enterprise
networks in support of premium services and applications including real-time
peering management, hosted storage, secure VPNs, and video conferencing. Q-Optics’
technology and unique business and pricing model will dramatically lower costs,
improve service velocity, and enhance revenue opportunities for network service
providers, co-location facility provides, ASPs, and enterprise customers worldwide.
(www.q-optics.com)
Q-Optics, 226 E. 54th
Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10022
phone: 212-758-9888, fax: 212-758-9889
###
Contact: Jeff
Parness
Corporate
Marketing Manager
Q-Optics,
Inc.
212-758-9888
ext. 102