Entrisphere names CEO, closes funding

Mark Floyd, who last year served as president of Siemens ICN, has been named president and CEO of Entrisphere, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company that will embark on its initial product rollout at the end of this year.

Floyd, who was co-founder, president and CEO of Efficient Networks before selling the company to Siemens for $1.5 billion in April 2001, had been working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Crosspoint Venture Partners. Entrisphere co-founder and interim CEO Bill Coughran will continue as the company’s COO.

“I thought I’d just retire, play some golf and sit on some boards but I was drawn back in by what these guys are doing,” said Floyd.

Floyd, who has taken four companies public over the course of his career, starts his stint at Entrisphere with a bit of a cushion as the company also announced the closing of a $33 million Series B round of funding.

While not revealing the specifics of the company’s initial access platform just yet, Floyd said it would be focused on giving carriers an evolutionary path to carrying voice and data on the same network. “It’s a broadband platform that supports POTS and all the traditional services,” he said. “On top of that it has all the data services all the way up to gigabit Ethernet.”