Belgium-based open RAN provider Accelleran has raised €6.8 million in a Series B funding round led by Cogito Capital Partners. The new funds will go to support its “global expansion”, the firm said, as it continues to target private 5G deployments as part of the Industry 4.0 movement.
Acceleran, conspicuous in the open radio access network (RAN) market, and in industrial-grade private 5G by extension, said mobile operators, edge computing infrastructure providers, and system integrators are turning to its ‘cloud-native’ LTE and 5G RAN software. The firm quoted Acumen Research, that the 5G services market will exceed $250 billion by 2027.
Frederic van Durme, chief executive at Accelleran, said: “From its inception, Accelleran has been a pioneer in applying cloud-based virtualization software architectures to mobile telecom, what is now commonly known as open RAN. The new financial backing and domain expertise of Cogito and Qbic, and the continued support of Capital-E and AAAF, will allow us to realize our mission to become a global, independent provider of mission critical software components for the RAN.”
Cogito Capital Partners is a venture and growth capital firm based in Warsaw and New York. It invests in late-stage B2B tech companies in Europe “with global potential”, focused on enterprise software, fintech and digital health. Others in the round included Qbic, which describes itself as an “sector-agnostic inter-university fund”, as well as early-stage venture capital firm Capital-E and the Ark Angels Activator Fund (AAAF), part of Flemish investment company PMV. The latter pairing are existing investors in Acceleran.
Martin Jasinski, general partner at Cogito, said: “We are excited about Accelleran’s prospects and impressed with the quality and scalability of the platform they’ve developed. We are strong believers in the future of OpenRAN-based, private 5G networks and see Accelleran as one of the emerging global leaders in a market that is about to enter a hypergrowth phase.”
Sofie Baeten, managing partner at Qbic, said: “Through this Series B funding, we are pleased to support Accelleran’s further development, and look forward to working with them as they address the huge market opportunity around disaggregated RAN.”
Marc Wachsmuth, managing partner at Capital-E, said: “We look forward to continuing to support Accelleran, together with new investors, in building out key go-to-market partnerships, with particular focus on the US and European markets.”
A statement from Acceleran said: “Accelleran’s dRAX delivers proven containerized software components to enable real-world deployment of multi-vendor, intelligent, and disaggregated open RAN, in alignment with the open standards such as the O-RAN Alliance. These cloud-native components deliver reliable, cost-effective, and scalable solutions for both 4G and 5G networks, including artificial intelligence-based automation.”
