press room

Exiting stealth mode today is Affirmed Networks, an Acton startup that is selling a new piece of communications gear to wireless carriers. The company is one I've been following closely since 2010, in part because it has raised $52 million in funding, and in part because it brings together veterans of several high-profile local companies, including Starent Networks, Sonus Networks, Airvana, and Cascade Communications. Also part of the team at Affirmed is former AT&T executive Terry Durand, who'd overseen the launch of the iPhone there.
Affirmed chief executive Hassan Ahmed, right, formerly CEO at Sonus, tells me the company has about 100 employees, and has lined up about a dozen wireless carriers in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and the Middle East who are testing its device, the poetically-named AN3000. Ahmed says he can't yet name any of the carriers.

"As consumers' data usage was growing like crazy, it required capital expenditures for the necessary network infrastructure to keep up with it," Ahmed says. "But our approach wasn't about just building a better box. We wanted to bring more intelligence to mobile networks." That can mean figuring out that you're trying to watch a popular YouTube video, and perhaps serving that up from a cache of commonly-requested files, or noticing that you're trying to download e-mail and routing you directly to the Internet, rather than relaying your request "along a complicated path that involved lots of boxes, before you got to the core of the network and then sent off to the Internet." Ahmed says that Affirmed's approach uses fewer network resources, and also enables operators to easily launch (and charge for) premium services, like higher-quality mobile videoconferencing.

Affirmed's backers include Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures, two Boston-area venture capital firms.