Why We Invested In Tarana Wireless Again
In venture capital, you double down on your most successful, transformative portfolio companies to drive returns for investors. This is why we’re partnering with our friends at Axon Capital and Khosla Ventures to participate in a $170 million Series 6 funding round in existing portfolio company Tarana Wireless. The funding makes Tarana the latest unicorn in our portfolio and sets them up to radically change the broadband provider landscape.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced billions around the world to work from home, learn remotely, and rely on the internet to remain connected to friends and family, but it also highlighted the digital divide that fiber networks are not going to be able to bridge. Geography, cost, and a number of other factors make burying or stringing fiber an unrealistic solution in many cases. This is why we believe that Tarana’s next-generation fixed wireless access (ngFWA) platform will be the transformational technology that closes this gap.
As a Tarana board member, I’ve been tremendously impressed by the company’s rapid growth and the overwhelming customer demand for its ngFWA platform — G1. Since our initial investment in February 2020, Tarana’s customer base has exploded. The company now serves more than 120 service providers who are deploying the technology to cover more than 15 million households around the world. The platform is surpassing performance expectations, turning customers into raving fans, and putting the company on track to generate massive revenue in 2022 and beyond.
This success is largely the result of its unique approach to FWA. The G1 platform is powered by a number of fundamental innovations in radio performance, including custom signal-processing silicon, firmware, antenna structures, and cloud service automation software, that make ngFWA the first truly viable alternative to fiber in many markets around the world.
Under the leadership of CEO Basil Alwan and an outstanding team of founders, Tarana has redesigned wireless technology from the ground up. Unlike current fixed wireless products based on technology built for mobile (4G/5G) or indoor local networking (Wi-Fi), Tarana’s G1 platform delivers large-scale, high-bandwidth Internet service to homes and businesses that might have never received broadband capabilities. With Tarana’s G1 platform, service providers can offer 100Mbps to 1Gbps Internet services in non-line-of-sight conditions, in both licensed and unlicensed spectrum, and across a broad range of market characteristics.
We believe Tarana and G1 have immense potential. Basil and his team are not only emerging as a major broadband internet solution provider, but they are also transforming the way we live. They are removing barriers for the more than 3 billion people around the world who do not have access to the internet. G1 is transformational technology that will connect hundreds of millions of households to broadband internet for the first time. Think about the world-changing impact that will have: millions of children will gain access to better educational tools, small businesses in developing countries will enter the global economy, and billions will be exposed to new ideas, transforming the world we live in forever.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
Sign up here if you are not already subscribed to our blog.
