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Berkeley Inventors of TinyOS Found Arch Rock to Scale Wireless Sensor Networks as the Next Tier of the Internet


Company Raises $5 Million Series A Funding From NEA, Shasta Ventures and IntelCapital


SAN FRANCISCO, March 27 /PRNewswire/ - Arch Rock, a company founded in mid 2005 to develop products that enable wide adoption of wireless sensor networks within the broader context of Internet technology, announced today that it secured a $5 million Series A investment from New Enterprise Associates, Shasta Ventures and Intel Capital. Forest Baskett, general partner with New Enterprise Associates, Rob Coneybeer, managing director with Shasta Ventures, and Judy Estrin, CEO of Packet Design, LLC, have joined the company's board of directors. The Series A funding will be used to expand the company team and its sales and marketing capabilities. It will also be used to further develop Arch Rock's cohesive set of portable operating systems, layered networking protocols and service oriented architectures, the three critical components that enable scalable deployment and rapid application development for sensing and control across numerous industries with diverse needs.

Wireless sensor networks are collections of tiny computers that can monitor almost anything -- such as light, motion, proximity, temperature, biometrics and chemical substances -- and are networked by forming wireless meshes using low-power radio. Arch Rock's Internet-enabled wireless sensor network solutions allow companies to apply business logic at all tiers of these sensor networks in order to easily capture new kinds of information from the physical world and harness that information through their enterprise software and web services applications. Arch Rock's vision is to help customers create and manage billions of sensor-based touch points with the physical world of matter and space and generate new actionable intelligence that can be leveraged in a wide variety of new industrial and consumer applications.

The Arch Rock management team is comprised of renowned experts in the fields of wireless sensor networks and embedded systems, Internet networking, and enterprise software.

  • Roland Acra, President and CEO. Acra is a 20-year networking industry veteran who was President and CEO at Procket Networks and held several senior executive positions at Cisco Systems.
  • Dr. David Culler, Chairman, co-founder and CTO. Culler is a professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, former director of Intel Research Berkeley and principal investigator of DARPA's Network Embedded Systems Technology program (DARPA NEST) that created the open TinyOS platform for wireless sensor networks.
  • Dr Wei Hong, co-founder and vice president of Engineering. Hong brings over 15 years of industry experience in databases and enterprise software, including as Principal Investigator at Intel Research and senior architect at Informix and Peoplesoft.

"Arch Rock brings a great team to this emerging area and we are excited to see their focus on integrating wireless sensor networks into the service architecture of the enterprise," said Prasad Rampalli, VP, Digital Enterprise Group at Intel.

"By being able to measure anything, monitor it on the Internet and act on the information, businesses will be able not only to predict the outcome of a situation, but actually influence or control that outcome. That's the promise of wireless sensor and control networks," said Forest Baskett, general partner with NEA. "The company's strategy to enable sensor technology to integrate seamlessly with the Internet and the Web has the potential to unlock the next wave of innovation on the Internet."

Arch Rock is already deploying tailored customer solutions across several industries and applications as diverse as industrial automation, logistics, and information technology.

"Our vision is that sensors will far outnumber computers and that the Internet architecture and value system is the way to scale," said Roland Acra, CEO, Arch Rock. "Multi-vendor hardware, networks spanning diverse links, and distributed applications -- these are the principles around which the Internet has thrived. We will bring forward these principles and look forward to building a healthy ecosystem in order to scale wireless sensor networks for the benefit of our customers," said Acra.

About Arch Rock

Arch Rock provides software, systems and services enabling wireless sensing and control networks to be easily deployed and integrated at scale within the Internet and enterprise frameworks. The San Francisco-based company deploys open-systems that bridge the gaps between manufacturers of sensor devices, wireless networking technology, and Internet based software applications. The company has secured financing from New Enterprise Associates, Shasta Ventures and Intel Capital. More information can be found at http://www.archrock.com.