much venture funding Mushroom has raised or identify any other investors. He also wouldn’t disclose the company’s current number of employees, and he insisted on demonstrating Mushroom’s technology for me at Zenzi Communications, Mushroom’s PR agency in Solana Beach, CA, instead of at the company’s San Diego headquarters.
Akin later explained by e-mail that it was not convenient to meet at the company’s headquarters because Mushroom has some “large confidential projects that we are doing for various clients.” Yet he was later willing to disclose that the company recently became profitable, and is generating roughly $10 million a year in revenue. So Mushroom won’t be doing any more venture financing, Akin tells me.
One explanation for his reticence could be that a number of other companies also offer ways to solve Internet bottleneck problems, including Brand Communications of Huntingdon, England; Sharedband of Ipswich, England; FatPipe Networks of Salt Lake City, UT; X Roads Networks of Irvine, CA, and Germany’s Viprinet.
So are the technology differences across this field really that significant?
There are various approaches that are trying to address the same or similar pain points for customers, Akin concedes. Nevertheless, he contends that Mushroom’s bonding technology is unique: “To give you a simple example: a branch office connecting to a headquarters office via a site-to-site VPN (a very common setup) can only enjoy one of their, say, three DSL lines at any given time with a load-balancing device (because the single VPN session cannot be split into smaller pieces). With Mushroom’s Broadband Bonding devices, however, that single VPN session can
