Meraki wants to celebrate 150 percent revenue growth and its 10,000th customer by bringing Oprah’s generosity to networking infrastructure. Now any company with angel, seed, or Series A funding can apply for a free Meraki Startup Kit with wireless access points and five-year license. The “gift” will help Meraki lock down future customers and make sure entrepreneurs have extra cash to strap up their boots.
Meraki, which sets up wireless networks for companies and schools, was a good sport to hook TechCrunch up with the early news on the Startup Kit program that’s open now but officially launches tomorrow.
Back in July I published a leak of Meraki’s secret $40 million funding round, roadmap, and financial details that revealed its plans to dominate enterprise Wi-Fi. It pulled in $20 million in Q2 2012, raised without giving away much equity, and is on a hiring spree in an attempt to box out competitors like Cisco and Aerohive.
Now Meraki’s ready for press. It was just an MIT dorm room project in 2006, but today it has 330 employees, 10,000 customers, and serious revenue growth. So it’s sharing the wealth. Social marketplace Copious and cloud infrastructure builder Vline got the beta version of the Meraki Startup Kit, and now other angel, seed, or Series A-backed startups in the U.S. or Canada can apply to get their own.
The kit would retail for around $15,000 and includes:
“We’ve received some fantastic support along the way and want to give something back to the tech community to help the next generation of startups disrupt their industries,” Meraki says. And if the startups who get the kits grow, they might be inclined to buy more gear from Meraki. Clever girl.
Meraki came out of a research project at MIT in 2006 and is now based in San Francisco. Meraki has grown rapidly from its modest roots. It now provides wired and wireless networking systems controlled in the cloud. Customers include universities (MIT, Stanford), retailers (Peet’s Coffee), hospitals, hotels, and others. Meraki is funded by Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital, and Google.
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