Acacia Communications Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering

“Summit has been an outstanding partner for Acacia, delivering tangible value in several ways. Their extensive industry network, unique perspectives on the optical networking sector, and solid strategic guidance have helped position Acacia for growth.”
Raj Shanmugaraj
Benny Mikkelsen
IPO 2016
Acquired by Cisco 2021
Ultra high-speed coherent optical interconnect solutions
Grew revenues by more than 10x during Summit’s investment
Tripled employee headcount
Completed IPO (NASDAQ: ACIA) in May 2016—the first venture-backed tech IPO of 2016—and exceeded a market cap of $1.2 billion within the first month of trading
Acacia was founded in 2009 with a vision to lead the optical networking industry into the 100G+ era. As one of the first vendors to launch a 100G subsystem with coherent detection in 2011, Acacia established an early leadership position in a rapidly growing market, with demand driven by network upgrade cycles as communications providers work to meet exponentially rising bandwidth demands. Seeking to accelerate R&D efforts to capitalize on the market opportunity, we believe Acacia chose to partner with Summit based on the firm’s deep communications technology experience, particularly its expertise in the optical networking sector.
How Summit helped:
Acacia continues to innovate, driving the “siliconization of optical interconnect” with products that are transforming cloud, content and communications networks. By converting optical interconnect technology to a silicon-based technology, Acacia significantly reduces the complexity and cost of high-speed networks while providing improvements in speed, capacity and power consumption.