Wyler-backed Tarana Wireless Funds Pre-Commercial Efforts 

Photo: Tarana

Tarana Wireless Inc. announced on Thursday that in January, it received $24 million of follow-on preferred equity with commitments for $36 million of additional preferred equity through October 2020, fully funding the company’s pre-commercial efforts. 

Tarana is preparing for mass production of its Tarana G1 Gigabit residential broadband platform. The company said the financing will also support the expansion of its Silicon Valley-based live demonstration network which it said currently provides broadband connectivity to over 100 sites – mostly non-line of sight – at distances up to 15 km from a single sector base-node.

Company founder and COO Sergiu Nedevschi said Tarana is beginning to manufacture its integrated circuits, and is finalizing its cloud-based controller which he said will enable ultra-fast deployment of its radio platform at massive scale. “As we look to bring our commercial products to market later this year, the overwhelming positive response from operators running their own Tarana-based pilot networks has reinforced both the transformational nature of our technology and the pressing market need for such a solution,” Nedevschi said. 

OneWeb Founder and Chairman Greg Wyler is a Tarana investor and board member through 1010 Holdings, his family investment office. Wyler said that Tarana has developed the world’s “first and only fixed wireless technology with built in anti-jamming interference cancellation capability.”

“This allows Tarana to unlock over 300MHz of unlicensed spectrum for direct-to-consumer broadband applications which will drive down costs and help bridge the digital divide. Until now, you needed large amounts of licensed spectrum to provide wireless broadband. Tarana enables true fiber quality broadband to users tens of miles away using free, unlicensed spectrum,” Wyler said.