Behind every great leader is a dedicated team of hardworking individuals and, if you’re lucky like us, great investors. Through the help of investors, we are able to fulfill our mission to unlock a spectrum of possibilities and continue to lead the wireless industry through the shared spectrum revolution. A year and a half following our first round of funding, we nearly doubled the numbers by closing $42 million in Series B through the support of industry leaders including: Charter Communications, American Tower Corporation, ARRIS International plc, and GIC. We appreciate the support for our company and vision through generous funding.
Where Will The Money Go?
As innovators who are continuing to grow in the shared spectrum space, funding goes a long way toward fueling that innovation and growth. Our funding will be leveraged in sales and marketing; continued research and development; and infrastructure investment. Most importantly, the funding helps to make LTE-ready spectrum immediately accessible, bringing the much anticipated and needed CBRS 3.5 GHz technology to market.
What Does The Funding Mean To Us?
This new round of funding means a great deal to our team. It’s a powerful form of validation from wireless industry leaders that underscores the importance of the work we have been committed to for the past six years. It also further cements the wireless industry’s dedication to shared spectrum and our position as an industry leader within the market.
Funding has been instrumental to our team’s ability to create multiple options to accelerate, expand and de-risk the path to commercialization, as well as conduct field trials and commercial engagements. We are proud to have partnerships with investors who are leaders in substantial markets and will continue to have commercial engagements underway with each while conducting field trials. As a founding member of the CBRS Alliance and among the first to receive conditional certification from the FCC, we paved the way by conducting an impressive 40 trials over the summer and fall.
What Does The Funding Mean To Investors?
Our investors experience a variety of benefits through our shared spectrum value drivers. For Charter, ranked as the second-leading cable company in the nation, the benefits are numerous. Not only does 3.5 GHz underpin their wireless strategy, but they have a whopping 16.6 million cable customers, in all segments, that stand to benefit from spectrum sharing, as well.
Global telecommunications technology leader ARRIS will be able to market via millions of integrated broadband systems, and their consumer and enterprise-integrated solutions could stand to benefit from a shared spectrum.
Lastly, are you familiar with the largest U.S. owner and operator of wireless communications infrastructure? If you guessed American Towers, you are spot on! With 140,000 global assets that could stand to benefit from a shared spectrum, American Towers recognized the strategic value of making an investment. Similar to ARRIS, their enterprise solutions could be positively impacted by shared spectrum.
From access to 150MHz of high quality spectrum on the CBRS band to promoting “plug and play” deployment to enabling new entrants and applications to a 50 to 80% savings in cost of deployment versus DAS, the spectrum of possibilities is literally endless. So you see, investing is a win-win relationship (and we truly mean a relationship). We go into each investment deal with the notion that we are entering a partnership. We want to ensure that this deal benefits our investors as much as it does our team and, most importantly, the ecosystem as a whole.
Before I close, on behalf of the Federated Wireless team, we would like to thank those companies and individuals who have invested in industry innovation over the past two years and have recognized the value our efforts bring to the future of wireless.
For more information on our partners and investors click here.
