Altiostar, a virtualized RAN technology company, has closed $114 million Series C round of financing from Rakuten, Qualcomm Ventures and Tech Mahindra.
Altiostar will use this financing to expand Altiostar’s virtual RAN solution to include 4G and 5G products allowing telecom operators to build web-scale cloud native networks.

Rakuten is the new investor in Altiostar, while Qualcomm Ventures and Tech Mahindra have committed their investment in 2018.

Research firm IDC expects the largest percentage of investment to be spent in the RAN portion of 5G networks, which is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 156.6 percent between 2018 and 2022.

Virtualization is seen by operators as a means to convert networks into a software-defined infrastructure that can scale with the agility required to meet this explosion of devices and applications.

“A round of this magnitude, backed by global technology leaders like Rakuten, Qualcomm Ventures and Tech Mahindra, signifies the immense 5G opportunity we have in front of us as well as the progress we have made developing our virtualized RAN technology,” said Ashraf M. Dahod, president and chief executive officer at Altiostar.

Altiostar has agreements with its partners.

Rakuten is deploying the Altiostar solution in their mobile network and the companies are collaborating on the development of 5G solutions.

Qualcomm Technologies, the #1 mobile chipset supplier, has entered into a development agreement with Altiostar.

Tech Mahindra, a leading IT services provider, has signed a value-added-reseller/system integrator contract with Altiostar.

Rakuten Group, headquartered in Japan, plans to launch a fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network in October 2019.