Ascend Communications, Inc. was an Alameda, California -based manufacturer of communications equipment that was later purchased by Lucent Technologies in 1999.
7-607: Ascend Communications was founded in 1988 and taken public in 1994. Initial investors included Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers (KPCB); Greylock Partners ; and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Ascend Communications designed and manufactured equipment for high-density dialup installations, most notably the MAX TNT , which allowed for a DS3 of dialup lines to be terminated in a few rack units. Customers such as AOL , Earthlink , Demon Internet , and UUnet purchased over two million dialup ports worth of MAX TNT access servers during
14-482: A Service Control Point technology critical to the convergence of voice and data networks that Ascend valued. The server business was sold off to private equity investors within months, following the Lucent deal. It now operates as Stratus Technologies . The company was acquired by Lucent Technologies in 1999. The $ 24 billion merger was the largest technology merger in history up to that time. Ascend's stock traded under
21-584: The B-STDX9000 frame relay switch and the CBX-500 and GX-550 ATM switches. The B-STDX and CBX/GX lines were the workhorses of most RBOC Frame Relay and ATM networks throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century. In February 1997, Ascend released the DSLPipe series. In August 1998, Ascend bought Stratus Computers for $ 822 million in stock. Stratus was primarily a maker of fault-tolerant computer systems but it owned
28-648: The Nasdaq symbol ASND . Greylock Partners Greylock Partners, LLC is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $ 3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software. Greylock was founded in 1965 in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Bill Elfers and Dan Gregory, joined shortly thereafter by Charlie Waite. Elfers and Waite had both worked at American Research and Development Corporation . The original capital of $ 10 million
35-597: The dialup days of the internet. Many companies still use MAX TNT for dialup (look for TNT in dialup hostnames). In the mid-1990s, the company was one of the leading vendors of ISDN modems and concentrators. Ascend Communications also acquired several companies. In 1996, it acquired NetStar, an Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based publicly traded manufacturer of ultra-high-performance, switched backplane, backbone routers capable 16 Gbit/s throughput. In 1997, Ascend acquired Cascade Communications . Cascade designed and manufactured high-density carrier packet switches, including
42-463: Was committed by a group of six families. The company opened a second fund in 1973. The company opened its first office in Silicon Valley in 1999. Greylock closed its 12th fund in 2005 with $ 500 million. In 2009, Greylock relocated its headquarters from the original Boston location to Silicon Valley. Also in 2009, Greylock opened its 13th fund with $ 575 million. In 2011, the 13th fund
49-671: Was increased to $ 1 billion. The company organized a 14th fund in 2013 with $ 1 billion. The company organized a 15th fund in 2016 with $ 1 billion. In 2020, it organized a 16th fund with $ 1 billion, and in 2021, the company raised an additional $ 500 million for the 16th fund to be used exclusively on seed deals. In 2014, Greylock launched Communities, a series of networking events centered on areas like design, big data, infrastructure engineering, user growth, data science, and network security. The communities are composed of product managers, engineers, and technologists from Silicon Valley's largest and fastest growing companies who meet once
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