Mahi buys Photuris assets for $1.8M

Mahi Networks acquired the assets of Photuris Networks for $1.8 million in cash, the equipment vendors announced today as part of a handful of announcements.

One Mahi spokesperson said the $1.8-million purchase price was about twice the value assigned to Photuris’ assets in court.

Mahi will rebrand Photuris’ V32000 reconfigurable add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) as the Vx7, inherit Photuris’ customers (there are five so far, all in the U.S., according to Mahi) and retain most of Photuris’ 50 remaining employees, including Photuris founder Ashish Vengsarkar, who is now Mahi’s vice president of global market development.

Last fall Photuris claimed the first live commercial deployment of ROADM--a technology said to be prized by several major U.S. carriers--when Verizon Enterprise Solutions installed Photuris’ V32000 at Texas A&M University. Photuris ceased operations in March 2004 because the company simply ran out of money, said Vengsarkar. Sources also said Photuris had recently fallen out of the running for a ROADM-based request for proposals SBC was evaluating at the time.

Mahi’s acquisition of Photuris occurred "about a month ago," said Mahi CEO Chris Rust, who said the acquisition, "takes Mahi from being a single-box vendor that’s kind of been the little engine that could and weathered the storm of the telecom market meltdown to being a more complete end-to-end metro solutions provider."

Mahi also announced an infusion of $70 million in new funding from a mix of new and existing investors, including Jerusalem Venture Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Wasserstein Ventures, Rho Ventures, St. Paul Venture Capital, Van Wagoner Capital Management and Meritech Capital Partners.

Mahi named another customer for its Mi7 metro core aggregation platform, also called an "ADM/crossconnect hybrid:" Scana Communications, a carrier’s carrier subsidiary of the Columbia, S.C., energy utility of the same name. Before Scana, Mahi’s only publicly announced customer since emerging from stealth mode a year ago was Midwestern independent telco Buckeye Telesystem. Mahi claims to have won a major U.S. carrier customer seven months ago that it might name this fall.

Mahi also announced a new focus on cable providers in addition to its existing target audience. The company named as its new vice president of global MSO sales Tim Holzer, who previously managed the Adelphia account for ADC Telecommunications.