JumpStartUp co-funds in $15m series financing for Aarohi

BANGALORE: JumpStartUp, a $45 million IT focused VC fund, announced on
Thursday a co-investment in $15m Series A financing in Aarohi Communications
Inc., a San Jose, CA based startup creating storage networking semiconductor
solutions.

The first-round financing for Aarohi was led by Silicon Valley investors
TeleSoft Partners and Broadview Venture Partners with JumpStartUp managing the
India investment angle.

Amar Kapadia, founder and director-marketing, Aarohi, said the funding would
be used to build a family of Storage Processing Engine products to enable the
next generation of storage networking. Aarohi also announced the launch of its
design center in Bangalore, which would be responsible for software development
and systems design.

Founded in 2000, Aarohi aims at enabling the next generation of Storage Area
Networks switch/ director, appliance, gateway, storage array, and Network
Attached Storage products. By pioneering Application Aware Storage Networking,
Aarohi aims to increase storage intelligence in the network. This will enable
storage resource management and enhance network performance, claims the company
founders. Aarohi’s feature-rich products also claim to improve scalability,
integration, system cost, and time-to-market.

The team at Aarohi consists of CEO Ameesh Divatia, formerly the chief product
strategist of optical products at Cisco and founder and CTO of Pipelinks, later
acquired by Cisco.

Commenting on their work in storage segment, Ameesh Divatia said, "The
influx of new technology into storage networking is creating a huge opportunity
for companies in this

space. We at Aarohi are enabling a brand new paradigm by creating a family of
Storage Processing Engines that will revolutionize how storage networks are
built and managed."

Added Shanti Subbaraman, founder, director software engineering and MD, Aarohi
India, "India is a major source of engineering talent for Aarohi. We aim to
make our co-design center the

leading center for developing products for storage networking in the embedded
environment. We are looking at hiring 30 engineers for our immediate
requirements", she added.

According to JumpStartUp's Sanjay Anandaram, "Aarohi will prove that
quality teams across the Silicon Valleys of US and India can attract quality
capital to co-develop valuable and successful leading edge technologies."
JumpStartUp is very excited to be an early part of this endeavor, he said.