Mavenir scooped up $100 million in new funding to help boost the open radio access network (RAN) vendor’s position in the still coalescing 5G market.

The latest funding round was led by Mavenir’s largest equity shareholder Siris, “along with investment from two highly strategic ecosystem partners,” the vendor added.

Mavenir President and CEO Pardeep Kohli in a statement said the proceeds would be used to “accelerate our capabilities in automation, sustainability and use of [artificial intelligence] as we enable our customers to efficiently deploy and operate open RAN-based end-to-end cloud-native networks.”

The vendor said it raised $250 million last year, including $155 million in a funding round last October. Mavenir in 2021 secured a $500 million “private placement” with Koch Strategic Platforms, which provided that investor with a “strategic minority equity investment” in Mavenir that it maintains.

Siris’ majority ownership stake dates to Mavenir’s lengthy origin story.

The company launched in 2005, went public in 2013, and then was purchased by Mitel in 2015. Mitel then turned around and sold Mavenir’s assets to Siris Capital Group, which then merged Mavenir with Xura, which acquired Ranzure Networks on Feb. 1, 2017. It then divested Xura’s non-core enterprise messaging business, which resulted in the new Mavenir dedicated to creating a software-based RAN.

The vendor filed plans for an initial public offering (IPO) in late 2020, which was targeted at raising more than $300 million. However, it quickly scuttled those efforts less than a month later.

Mavenir has since made several acquisitions to further boost its technology portfolio, including the purchase of small cell vendor ip.access in 2020, and communication platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) provider Telestax in 2021.

Mavenir’s latest funding comes at a critical time for the broader open RAN ecosystem. A handful of operators have touted deployment plans despite ongoing concerns over testing, integration and performance characteristics.

“Early adopters are embracing the movement toward more openness but at the same time there is more uncertainty when it comes to the early majority operator and the implications for the broader RAN supplier landscape now with non-multi-vendor deployments driving a significant portion of the year-to-date open RAN market,” Dell’Oro Group VP Stefan Pongratz noted in a recent report.

Mavenir is considered one of the leading open RAN vendors and is part of numerous of open RAN and 5G core deployments and trials.

Mavenir exited 2022 ranked by Dell’Oro Group as one of the market’s top open RAN vendors alongside Samsung, Fujitsu and NEC. However, its overall RAN market share pales in comparison to more established vendors like Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, which continue to dominate the $40 billion RAN market.

A recent Gartner Magic Quadrant report placed Mavenir in its “visionaries” box alongside those open RAN rivals. The research firm lauded Mavenir’s OpenBeam system and carrier wins, but noted market scale continues to hamper the vendor’s growth opportunities.

The vendor last month scored a deal with U.K.-based Virgin Media O2 to provide its open virtualized RAN gear and act as the prime systems integrator for the operator’s 5G update plans.

Mavenir is also a significant part of Dish Network’s extensive open RAN-based 5G network deployment. This includes support for more than 40,000 radios across Dish Network’s operations.

The vendor earlier this year unveiled public availability of its open RAN intelligent controller (RIC) targeted at providing telecommunication operators using open RAN architecture with greater control over those network deployments. Mavenir said the platform has already been tapped by a pair of “tier-one operators” for use in their open RAN deployments, and had previously shown interoperability with Indian operator Bharti Airtel and has been working with a number of operators in Europe.

Mavenir is also part of the recently established Multi-G Initiative that is looking to open the RAN interface down to the layer-one (L1) silicon stack of a telecommunications network. The work is focused on disaggregating RAN intelligence and scheduling functions that can support updates to the underlying silicon architecture. This will allow that architecture to support higher capacity and software-defined deployments for legacy 4G LTE, current 5G and future next-generation wireless standards.