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KODIAK PARTNERS AFFIRMS FOCUS ON DATA CENTER SECTOR

Kodiak Venture Partners affired it's focus on the data center sector by strengthening their commitment through additional Egenera funding. With this third round of funding for Egenera Inc., Kodiak Venture Partners has underscored it's commitment to investing in innovative startup companies in the data center market, ranging from companies that are rapidly advancing networked applications and server virtualization to those addressing new demands for lower cost of ownership solutions.

Kodiak Venture Partners is underscoring its commitment to investing in innovative startup companies in the data center market, ranging from companies that are rapidly advancing networked applications and server virtualization to those addressing new demands for lower cost of ownership solutions. Egenera, Inc., a leader in next-generation data center infrastructure, represents one of the key components of Kodiak's portfolio in this dynamic market segment.

"The amount of stored corporate data is doubling about every year," said Robert Montague, Senior Research Analyst at RBC Capital Markets. "This year, estimates place the amount of stored data at 12 times what it was just four years ago. This growth, coupled with the complexity and costs of data management and processing, creates strong ROI justification for storage management development. We believe a sustained level of focus on emerging breakthroughs in this arena by Kodiak, which is familiar with the industry and how ideas progress to market-worthy offerings, would likely prove highly rewarding."

Kodiak's team has several partners focused in this area, including Ilan Carmi, who spearheads the investment activity in this segment, as well as Dave Furneaux and Lou Volpe. The firm began identifying data center market trends in early 2000, has made four key investments in those areas and plans to dedicate an additional portion of its $290 million fund to this area.

The Kodiak business model provides a number of advantages, including early investments, hands-on business acceleration, and relationships with key industry players. With this model, the funded companies have realized accelerated growth, commercial success and attainment of key business milestones even in today's challenging technology market. The funded companies include:

Egenera: A Massachusetts startup included in the Red Herring 100 and Network World's "10 Start-ups to Watch in 2002." Egenera has pioneered a nextgeneration approach to data center computing by integrating hardware, software, networking and services into a system that speeds application time to market, keeps applications online, improves data center management and lowers total cost of ownership.

Trebia Networks: A Massachusetts startup delivering high-performance, systemon -silicon solutions for storage networking applications. Trebia's Storage Network Processor (SNP) - is specifically optimized for storage networking solutions.

Paceline Systems Corporation: A Massachusetts startup that has developed the first enterprise-class switching system based on the open InfiniBand I/O specification. Paceline's products deliver the performance of InfiniBand and the scalability, manageability, reliability and ease-of-use required by enterprise applications.

CipherOptics: A North Carolina startup innovating high-speed data encryption for information security in high-speed data center networks. The company's Gigabit-speed data encryption appliance eliminates security bottlenecks by maximizing throughput levels across all network applications.

"These companies provide a strong foundation on which Kodiak will continue to build its data center focus," said Carmi. "We believe emerging technologies involving fiber channel controllers and switches, network-attached data appliances, advanced software file systems, storage monitoring and reallocation systems and a wide array of other innovations stand to significantly change the competitive landscape in the near term."

Kodiak is currently identifying start-ups that are developing solutions to address the growing gap between rapidly escalating data volumes and the cost and complexities of data management and processing. It will continue to seek out and fund startups with the most promising new technologies in the highstakes data center sector.

About Kodiak Venture Partners

Kodiak Venture Partners is a venture capital firm focused on seed and early stage investments in emerging communications, semiconductor and software companies. With a focus in the eastern regions of the U.S. and Canada, Kodiak Venture Partners builds relationships with entrepreneurs seeking accelerated market success. Kodiak's investment partners are successful high-technology business entrepreneurs who take a high-impact, hands-on approach to forming, operating, building and funding market leaders.

For more information, visit www.kodiakvp.com.