Two prominent venture capital firms will acquire the legendary BBN development labs from Verizon. General Catalyst Partners, a private equity firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Accel Partners, a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California, said the deal would allow BBN to continue its legacy of innovation and technology leadership. Financial terms were not disclosed.
BBN was founded in 1948 by MIT professors Richard Bolt and Leo Beranek, along with Robert Newman, with a vision of starting a small, acoustical consulting firm. The company is best know for its pioneering work with the ARPANET (the forerunner of today’s Internet) in 1969. It is also credited with the first implementation of packet switching (1969), the first router (1976), and the first network e-mail (1971), which established the @ sign as an icon for the digital age. BBN is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
BBN, which has more than 600 employees in offices across the U.S., is currently focused on a number of advanced technologies, including quantum computing, system integration; distributed, collaborative applications; speech recognition; language understanding; wireless and satellite networking; network architecture and management; information security; structural acoustics; sensor signal processing; and real-time, multi-processor systems. http://www.bbn.com/http://www.generalcatalyst.com
- BBN, and its BBN Planet ISP business, was acquired by GTE Corporation in 1997. In 2000, GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon Communications. As part of this merger, the GTE Internetworking business was spun out to form Genuity (later acquired by Level 3) and BBN Technologies.
