Q9 Networks secures $88.5 million in second round financing

📅 April 10, 2001 - Q9 Networks (q9.com -> equinix.com), a leading Canadian provider of Internet infrastructure and managed services announced Monday that it had closed its second round of financing, securing a total of $88.5 million Canadian. The new investment, which will be directed toward building state-of-the-art data centers in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, and brings the total equity raised by the company in the past 12 months to $115 million Canadian.
The new round of funding comes from a group of Canadian investors, including Soctia Merchant Capital, OMERS, TD Capital Canadian Private Equity Partners, J.L. Albright Venture Partners, Vengrowth Capital, e-Scotia Acquisition, Shaw Ventures, and Working Ventures. According to Q9, its success in raising this amount of capital, especially considering the difficult market conditions, is a powerful reaffirmation of its investors? belief in its business plan and the company's ability to execute it.
Q9 says that since the company officially opened in Toronto in October 2000, it has seen acute success in gathering marquee customers like Noranda Inc., Descartes Systems Group, Grocery Gateway and CertaPay. Q9 says it intends to continue building its brand of Internet infrastructure in Canada. Part of this plan includes hiring more than 100 new staff, mostly in technical and sales positions, brining the company's total staff to more than 160 full-time employees. The company will begin selecting sites and constructing its new facilities immediately.
Scotia Merchant Captial, one of Q9's investors says it sees a large and growing market for outsourced IT services in Canada, because of the scarity of IT talent. It feels that Q9 is well positioned to capitalize on this market, and expects rapid growth for the company.
When the construction of new facilities is complete, Q9 will be soundly positioned atop the Canadian market, with a national network of five data centers, including its Toronto facility, and a total of more than 100,000 square feet of floor space. Each center will provide advanced infrastructure and managed services, including firewalls, disaster recovery, load balancing, virtual private networks, and streaming media, to enterprise clients with Web operations.
Q9's new data centers across the country will be modelled after the Toronto center, and will be engineered to support the company's impressive 100% uptime guarantee. The hardware measures will include multiple power feeds, UPS battery backup, emergency diesel generators, redundany HVAC systems and fire detection and suppression systems. The sites will also be equipped with an array of security features, including video surveillance, security officers and biometric authentication systems.
Read more about Q9 Networks Toronto data center here.