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InterWest Partners Leads Latest Investment Round in the Only Wi-Fi Power Play in the Industry

Thousand Oaks, California – December 1, 2009 – Xirrus, Inc. announced that it has secured an additional $20 million in a financing led by InterWest Partners.  This financing round brings the total investment in the company to $80 million.  Xirrus will use the new funds to bolster its reserves and strategically invest in partnerships with large integrators focused on making Wi-Fi the primary network connection for their customers.  The financing is anticipated to be the last round of private funding Xirrus will require.

“Times have changed since my last technology venture,” said Dirk Gates, founder and CEO of Xirrus (previously founder and CEO of Xircom, which was valued at more than $2.0 billion before being sold to Intel® in 2001).  “Xirrus has reached critical mass and significant customer traction with far less fanfare, yet far more substance than venture-backed companies during the 1990’s. We have quietly outpaced the competition by outperforming them on nearly every level – products, productivity and capital efficiency – as evidenced by many thousands of successful deployments, with 100% customer satisfaction, while growing at a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 250% over the past three years.”

Xirrus also announced the appointment of Khaled Nasr, Partner at InterWest Partners, to Xirrus’ board of directors.  Mr. Nasr joins current Xirrus board members Dave Marquardt of August Capital; Steve Krausz of US Venture Partners; Eric Young of Canaan Partners; Bill Schroeder, former Vice Chairman of Connor Peripherals; and Dirk Gates, president and CEO. All existing venture investors including August Capital, US Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, and QuestMark Partners participated in the round.

“We have been monitoring the Wi-Fi industry in search of a viable investment for several years, but have been dissatisfied with the lack of differentiation and leadership among the vendors,” said Khaled Nasr, Partner at InterWest. “There was one Wi-Fi vendor, however, who had the leadership, vision, and products we were looking for.  Xirrus not only has a management team with proven operational abilities, but they also have the vision and products to take Wi-Fi to the next level – to replace wired Ethernet to the desktop with wireless connectivity.”

About InterWest Partners
InterWest Partners (www.interwest.com http://www.interwest.com), founded in 1979, is a leading diversified venture capital firm focused on building long-term relationships with entrepreneurs and portfolio companies. Currently investing its tenth fund, InterWest X, a $650 million fund, InterWest has raised more than $2.8 billion of capital since inception. InterWest has a total of 13 partners and general partners in Menlo Park, CA and Dallas, TX, who bring together deep domain knowledge in life sciences and information technology.

The firm’s past successful investments in information technology include: CIENA (CIEN), Copper Mountain Networks (CMTN), Crystal Semiconductor (acquired by Cirrus Logic, CRUS), Cyrix (CYRX; acquired by National Semiconductor (NSM), Lightera (acquired by CIENA), PlaceWare (acquired by Microsoft, MSFT), SiTera (acquired by Vitesse, VTSS), Silicon Graphics (SGI), Stratacom (STRM; acquired by Cisco, CSCO) and Xilinx (XLNX).

About Xirrus
Xirrus, the only Wi-Fi “Power Play”, manufacturers the Wi-Fi Array® architecture that displaces both overlay Wi-Fi offerings and switched Ethernet and Fast Ethernet to the desktop. The Wi-Fi Array integrates 4, 8, 12, 16, or 24 802.11abg+n radios coupled to a high-gain directional antenna system into a single device along with an onboard multi-gigabit switch, Wi-Fi controller, firewall, dedicated Wi-Fi threat sensor, and an embedded spectrum analyzer. The Wi-Fi Array provides more than enough bandwidth, security, and control to replace switched Ethernet to the desktop as the primary network connection. The Xirrus Wi-Fi Array delivers the most coverage, bandwidth, throughput, and user density on a per device and per system basis than anything else available on the market today – resulting in a solution that uses 75% fewer devices, cabling, switch ports, power, space, and installation time compared with any other offering.
Xirrus is a privately-held company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. For more information, please visit www.xirrus.com http://www.xirrus.com.

Xirrus – Switching: Without Wires™

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Xirrus – Wi-Fi Array®

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