Cellwize, which provides self-organizing network (SON) software for mobile operators, has raised $14.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Carmel Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners. In addition, Viola Credit granted a $10 million credit facility to Cellwize.
The funding will be used to boost Cellwize’s SON capabilities and to increase its workforce.
SON is an automation technology designed to make the configuration, management, and healing of mobile radio access networks (RANs) faster. As mobile operators begin gearing up for 5G, they will be using more software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies, and SON is poised to become prominent as well.
Two-year-old Cellwize, headquartered in Singapore, says its SON solutions are already implemented at mobile operators serving over 300 million subscribers. Cellwize’s SONCloud is part of the HP OpenNFV platform, and Cellwize is part of the HP OpenNFV Application Partner Program.
“Because we are a young company, our solutions are Java-based and are inherently designed to run on virtual machines; most of our operators are already virtualized,” Ofir Zemer, CEO at Cellwize, tells SDxCentral in an email. “In Germany we have a customer running our SON with eight virtual machines.”
The founders of Cellwize include Daniel Dribinski, CTO, who previously worked at Schema and Orange, and Sasi Geva, VP of business development, who formerly worked at Motorola, Orange, and Alvarion.
In 2007, the partners formed a company called Triangulum, which bought RF optimization services on a consultancy basis and garnered customers such as AT&T and Cellcom. The partners recognized an opportunity to create their own SON products and started operating a platform in Beta within Cellcom in 2010, achieving a full national rollout in 2012. So by the time they started Cellwize in 2012, they already had a working product.
Zemer says its competitors include Cisco using the Intucell stack; Nokia Networks, following its Eden Rock acquisition; Amdocs with its Actix and Celcite acquisitions; and Ericsson and Huawei, which have their own SON solutions.