Seed funding to enable mesh networking

Ember Corp has received $3 million in a seed round led by Polaris Venture Partners with DFJ New England, Stata Venture Partners and Bob Metcalfe.

Ember Corp has received $3 million in a seed round led by Polaris Venture Partners with DFJ New England, Stata Venture Partners and Bob Metcalfe.

Ember is building a low-cost, low-power wireless embedded networking platform.

The company also announced new board members, including Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder; Dr Rebecca Henderson, the Eastman Kodak LFM Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management; and Todd Hixon, Managing Director of DFJ New England, an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading early-stage information technology venture capital firm.

The Chairman of the Board is Ember founder and Chief Technology Officer Dr Robert D Poor, who has helped drive several of the industry's noteworthy multimedia innovations in the past 25 years.

Also continuing as a board member will be Amy Salzhauer, of Ignition Ventures, a firm that specialises in ramping early-stage companies.

The seed funding marks the firm's entry into the rapidly accelerating market for wireless networking.

Ember will use the funding to refine its core technology - originated by Poor at the MIT Media Lab - and to deploy a third generation of its embedded wireless platform in commercial Beta sites to prove its power in diverse applications.

The company also will continue building out its team.

"This year, eight billion microprocessors will be shipped", said Metcalfe, a Venture Partner at Polaris.

"Only a small%age of these are networked".

"Ember is developing a networking platform for embedded processors in their many applications".

"'Embernet' reminds me of Ethernet, which was developed as a standard networking platform for personal computers".

"My partners at Polaris, who have a long and successful history of backing MIT spin-outs, are excited to join the Ember team".

"The opportunity to work with investors like Bob Metcalfe, Polaris, DFJ New England, and Stata Venture Partners is a critical and extremely positive step as we bring the Ember technology to a broad new set of customers", said Poor, author of Ember's initial patent for self-organising networks.

"We look forward to working with leading players in the embedded market to create an extended suite of high-value, next-generation wireless applications".

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