Private company

Cerent Corporation

Logo: Cerent Corporation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons3

Cerent Corporation was an optical equipment maker based in Petaluma, California. It was founded in 1997 as Fiberlane Communications with funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Vinod Khosla as the managing VC. The company was founded with three divisions: Systems in Petaluma, Chip Design in Mountain View, California and Network Management Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia.2 It is part of Cisco.1 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 20, 2026.

Overview

1997Founded1

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Cerent Corporation was an optical equipment maker based in Petaluma, California. It was founded in 1997 as Fiberlane Communications with funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Vinod Khosla as the managing VC. The company was founded with three divisions: Systems in Petaluma, Chip Design in Mountain View, California and Network Management Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia. In early 1998 the company split into two companies with the Petaluma branch becoming Cerent and the Burnaby and Mountain View branches becoming Siara Systems (Acquired by Redback Networks in 1999).2

Corporate structure

Cerent Corporation is part of a group headed by Cisco. 320 entities, 82 countries on record. Switch between the flow chart and the network, and select any entity to see its details.

Built from parent and subsidiary links from GLEIF, the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (CC0); subsidiaries listed in Exhibit 21 of annual reports filed with the SEC; subsidiaries, stakes and holdings from Wikidata (CC0). Each entity in the chart links to its source.

The story

The primary founders of the company were: Raj Singh, Jay Sethuram, Ajaib Bhadare and Paul Elliott. The rest of the founding team (as of funding by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers) consisted of:

Petaluma - Systems (Cerent)

Mike Hatfield

Tom Corker

Ajaib Bhadare

Paul Elliott

Chip Roberson

David Scott

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Mountain View - Chip Design (Siara)

Raj Singh

Jay Sethuram

Mike Iriarte

Anu Nigam

Burnaby - Network Management System (Siara)

Alnoor Shivji

Sigfried Luft

The founding board of directors was: Raj Singh, Vinod Nair and Don Green (often referred to as "The Father of Telecom Valley").

Mike Hatfield soon after joined the team as CEO, replacing Raj Singh.

From Wikipedia’s article on Cerent Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Subsidiaries and ownership

Parent company

From Wikidata.1

Timeline

  1. 1997Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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