Focus on Funding: Corvil Networks designs technology that promises to cut companies' telephone bills and ensure that their IT systems do not collapse under the weight of the latest multimedia services.

This week it announced that it had completed a €15 million funding round led by Apax Partners, one of the world's biggest private equity firms, with offices based in Israel, Europe and the US. ACT Venture Capital and Cisco Systems are also investors in Corvil Networks, which plans to expand marketing and sales of its hardware and software products.

The firm launched its first suite of products in April 2004 and is understood to have signed up customers, including a subsidiary of car manufacturer General Motors.

Its products encompass patented algorithms that measure and analyse packet switched IP-based networks.

This enables firms to predict with much greater certainty how much bandwidth they need to buy or order.

The prestigious US research consultancy, Forrester, highlighted in December 2004 that Corvil was now a significant competitor in the market for bandwidth measurement and monitoring.

It concluded that as corporations moved away from traditional communication networks towards "meshed IP networks", there were considerable opportunities for new entrants.

The complicated algorithms encompassed in the products were developed by a group of scientists from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), led by the late Professor John Lewis, one of the people who founded Corvil Networks in 2000.

Since then the company has taken on €30 million venture capital funding and hired a management team under Mr Donal Byrne, Corvil's chief executive. Mr Byrne previously worked for Bay Networks, which later became Nortel Networks.

After such aggressive expansion and fundraising over the past five years, Corvil Networks will now have to find new customers for its products.

Expect to hear more about the firm in 2005, when it should begin to sign significant deals with corporate customers.