Israel-based mobile technology company Cellwize raised $32 million in its latest round of funding led by Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures, raising to date $56.5 million from investors to penetrate new markets with its automated 5G network tool.
TechCrunch reported, shareholders Verizon Ventures and Samsung Next, along with other investors Deutsche Telekom and Portuguese company Sonae also, participating in the Series B funding.
Cellwize will use the fresh funds to expand and penetrate new markets with its CHIME platform, a technology used to deploy 5G networks by operators. CHIME is a smart RAN fully automated platform with open APIs and architecture.
The Israeli company supplies 40 operators including Verizon and Telefonica, in 16 countries, supporting three million cell sites and supporting 800 million subscribers.
Ofir Zemer, Cellwize CEO noted 5G is “changing the landscape” of the telecoms market, by allowing operators to buy and build with more than one RAN provider.
“These traditional vendors usually offer solutions which plug into their own equipment, while not allowing third parties to connect, and this creates a closed and limited ecosystem. [But] the large operators also are not interested in being tied to one vendor: not technology-wise and not on the business side – as they identify this as an inhibitor to their own innovation.”