San Francisco-based startup Tibit Communications secured $25 million in its Series B funding that was led by Intel Capital, and included Swisscomm Ventures and AJU IB Investment. That amount was $5 million more than what it had initially gained in the funding round that began in April.

The company is using the funds to support its MicroPlug optical line terminal (OLT), which launched Wednesday. Tibit's goal was to develop a 10-gigabit optical network access device that reduced the need for application-specific hardware.

"Our challenge was to do something never attempted in this industry – reduce an entire OLT, including an entirely new ASIC and 10G optics, into a standards-based pluggable form factor," said Tibit CEO Richard Stanfield in a statement. "The result is a product that saves an extraordinary amount of space and power, and we are encouraged by the strong market reception of this game-changing device."

The MicroPlug OLT integrates all passive optic network (PON) Layer 1 and Layer 2 functionality into a transceiver optics form factor. Tibit claims that by eliminating unnecessary management layers from the OLT, PON management can be virtualized and moved into a carrier's cloud architecture.

"The Tibit MicroPlug technology is a great example of the power of virtualization," said Dave Flanagan, VP and senior management director for Intel Capital, in a statement. "It provides more flexibility, higher density, and lower cost by deploying PON in general-purpose Ethernet switching equipment and management solutions, which can be entirely virtualized on Intel processor-based servers."

Pär Lange of Swisscom Ventures said in a statement that Tibit's MicroPlug stands a real chance to disrupt the PON market. "We see their solution as uniquely positioned to help carriers enable next-generation architectures for access and management solutions," he said.

Tibit was founded in 2014, and has raised nearly $55 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.