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Updated Again: So I am getting old. It took more three days to find out all the skinny I needed to find out on Stoke. That’s my excuse for slow blogging, by the way. Here is an update on Stoke.

* Founded in March 2004, and funded by Silicon Valley Angels. In May 2004, raised A round of VC funding from KP and Sequoia. In June 2004, raised more “working capital” from Lighthouse Capital and Silicon Valley Bank. The B-Round was led by Integral Capital Partners and Pilot House.
* Apart from Randall Kruep who is the CEO, the team includes Peter Wexler, who is the VP of Engineering and recently of Juniper Networks. Bill Evans is handling the Hardware side of things, while Bill Snow is the software guru. Evans comes from Nortel/Shasta, while Snow is a Cisco alumni. Bunch of others who are all from either Cisco, Juniper, Redback or Wellfleet.
* They are a two part solution - and without going into technical mumbo-jumbo, they are making what they call a Mobile Session Router (MSR) and Convergence Signal Gateway (SGN) and it will all be managed through a special software.

Updated & Corrected: A five-letter-stealthmode start-up, Stoke, has Silicon Valley buzzing - thanks to investments from KP and Sequoia, the guys who last time teamed up to invest in Google and made billions. Our friend Matt Marshall over on Silicon Beat has been busy trying to ferret out details, but not much information is to be found.

This is an investment spearheaded by former Redback Networks executive/Sequoia partner Guarav Garg. The company is led by former Procket Networks CEO Randall Kruep. Other investors in the company include Integral Capital Partners and Presidio Financial Partners.The moneymen want to keep a lid on this one, and from company’s website you can’t really guess much. Still, I had to try.

My sources in the telecom/networking universe tell me that the company is building some sort of a gateway that helps bring together standard cellular and in building WiFi/WiMAX networks. This is an area of lot of interest amongst carriers and equipment makers. Everyone from Lucent, Nokia, Ericsson, Nortel and not to mention start-ups such as Bridgeport and Kineto are chasing this market.
Light Reading adds: Stoke is working on a box that will enable an end-to-end VPN connection from “any-to-any” network point. So that could be a WLAN network to a GSM network, or a cable network to WiMax.

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