CCS completes £4.5 million funding round

CCS has raised £4.5 million of investment to enable the company to accelerate commercial deployment of its unique microwave small-cell backhaul system. The funding was led by CCS Chairman and Cambridge Angels Founder Robert Sansom and is backed by Cambridge Wireless Chairman David Cleevely, serial entrepreneur Mark Richer as well as Imperial Innovations, Cambridge Angels, Etagra Group and the Cambridge Capital Group.

CCS has developed a unique self-organising microwave backhaul system to address the explosive data demand experienced by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). The system provides the backhaul capacity needed to support dense deployments of mobile small cells and has been designed from the start to be deployed in a cost-effective manner on street-furniture in large-scale dense urban environments. It has a small physical footprint, an understanding of its radio deployment environment, and an automatic capacity planning capability. The resulting backhaul networks are self-healing, have a very high data capacity with low latency, and are easy to install as they require no radio alignment. “Since the seed round investment we made in CCS at the end of 2011, the company has successfully delivered its first systems for trial with network operators. We are confident that CCS will continue to make good business progress.” commented CCS Chairman Robert Sansom.

Steve Greaves, CCS CEO, said: We would like to thank our current and new investors for their robust support of our company. Over the last year we have continued the development of the product and our company, we have deepened our market engagement and are currently undertaking a number of significant trials with our key partner MNOs. In 2013, CCS is aiming to deploy a number of commercial pilot networks as a precursor to larger scale small-cell deployments in 2014/2015. The scale of this investment round provides us with a clear runway to the successful execution of our business plan.

CCS Ltd was founded by Steve Greaves and John Porter both experienced entrepreneurs who were co-founders of Adaptive Broadband Limited and Cambridge Broadband Networks Limited.