Stoke, a US-based provider of mobile broadband equipment, has raised $17m in its series E round from a consortium including its customers.
Net One Systems, Stoke’s distributor in Japan as a networking and systems integration provider, and phone operator NTT’s Docomo Capital corporate venturing unit reinvested in Stoke, a year after NTT started using its Stoke Session Exchange 3000 product.
Due to the rapid increase in mobile data traffic from greater use of multimedia services in recent years, Docomo is building an all-internet protocol network infrastructure for a so-called Long Term Evolution service.
Venture capital firm Focus Ventures led the E round, and was joined by peers DAG Ventures, Integral Capital Partners, Pilot House Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mobile Internet Capital, which is 30% owned by NTT Docomo.
Stoke raise $15m in its series D round in April 2009 from a consortium that then included Reliance Technology Ventures (RTVL), the corporate venture capital arm of India-based Reliance ADA Group, to take its total to more than $65m.
RTVL had first invested in January 2008 as its parent’s holdings include Reliance Communications, a telecommunications company in India. A year earlier was Stoke’s $20m series C round.