Dot Edu Ventures : press

Dot Edu Ventures Makes Three New Investments in Forward-thinking Technology Companies
For immediate release
August 22nd, 2000

PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA – August 22nd, 2000 — Dot Edu Ventures announced today that it has added three new companies to its portfolio of investments. Consistent with the mission of Dot Edu Ventures, these companies are developing businesses around cutting edge technologies developed within academia. "All of these companies will be making an order of magnitude difference in the markets they serve and potentially changing the face of the internet, depending on the momentum they acquire. We, at Dot Edu will make sure we work closely with these young companies to help them realize their full market potential. For now, I see only the sky as the limit." Say Asha Jadeja, the founder and managing partner of Dot Edu Ventures.

The Recent Investments Include Centrata, Bytemobile, & Sychron

Centrata
Born at MIT and developed by pioneers in distributed computing, Centrata has created technology that revolutionizes networking. In the P—2—P (peer—to—peer) space, Centrata takes ordinary desktop computers, each one unstable and insecure in its own right, and combine them to create the ideal, enterprise-class computing platform. Centrata boasts petabytes of storage, gigaflops of processing power, and a geographic reach the world round.

Bytemoblie
Bytemobile introduces a revolutionary technology that achieves an order of magnitude speedup end user experience and 2x increase in carrier capacity for wireless data networks. Bytemobile creates a new market space: virtual wireless POPs, with QoS and content aware transport and content accelerators that are fully transparent to existing client-server infrastructure. Its patent-pending technology is the result of four years of NSF, Army and DARPA funded research at top universities led by a core technical team of recognized world leaders in wireless, networking, and multimedia technologies.

Sychron
A "Virtual Private Server" (VPS) company, Sychron has developed a major new software infrastructure for business-critical internet services that need to handle unpredictable demand and explosive growth.

Dot Edu Ventures
Dot Edu Ventures is based in Palo Alto, California. A unique venture capital organization, Dot Edu Ventures is a university-based network of friends, spanning computer science and business faculty, alumni, and entrepreneurs. The organization is overseen by one of its members, Asha Jadeja. One goal is to provide a common forum within which the members can continue to learn from, and assist in, the entrepreneurial endeavors of colleagues and students.

Dot Edu Venture’s strategy consists of the following three components:

A modest fund to allow seed-stage investment in ideas and technologies that the members might be closely involved with. These could include, for instance, technologies built around doctoral and post-doctoral research. Examples of graduate student and faculty research in our group that have resulted into excellent internet companies are Google, Akamai and Gigabeat, along with others.
A network of pro-active investors, advisors and mentors with a strong commitment to mentoring the companies in our portfolio.
A regular forum for the exchange of ideas. The organization will explore how knowledge gained from these interactions can be used for informing the design of future research projects and curricula in the departments and campuses represented by our members. Recommendations to the respective institutions will be made.

Dot Edu Ventures typically invests $500,000 to $1.0 million per company.