In 2006, David Giannini was selling his company, Core Communications, to Swisscom. Giannini’s Dulles-based provider of wiring and other networking services worked with major hotel chains like Marriott, Hilton and Holiday Inn.
The following year, as you might recall, marked the dawn of the iPhone.
Soon enough, “Everyone walking around has one or two or three devices,” Giannini observed. “It’s putting a great stress on the networks.”
So he decided to work on tackling the widespread congestion of public networks.
In 2012, he launched CirrusWorks, a Falls Church-based company that is helping coworking spaces, universities, schools and hotels speed up their networks by reallocating bandwith more efficiently.
The company’s proprietary system, called The Governor, combines a hardware appliance and a software platform that makes incremental decisions, at a rate of 8,000 to 20,000 times a second, and “smoothes out all the spikes during peak demand,” said Giannini.
The product went to market in late 2014, and it’s already servicing several networks in the region and elsewhere — including at UberOffices, Eagle Academy Public Charter School and the Dulles-based Center for Innovative Technology, which is also an early investor.
The company has raised several rounds, recently taking in $1 million on the tail end of a total $4 million round that was launched in June 2014 and led by area investors.
Of CirrusWorks’s eight full-time employees, several had worked together at Transaction Network Services (TNS), a Reston-based credit card authentication powerhouse acquired in 1999 by PSINet. TNS’s founder and former CEO John McDonnell is now a lead investor in CirrusWorks.
“That whole team is still together,” said Giannini.
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