AT&T investing up to $200 million in venture capital fund

Collaboration with Coral Group Will Launch or Invest in Startup Companies Working on Industry Challenges

AT&T* has committed to investing up to $200 million in a venture capital fund as part of its ongoing effort to develop solutions to the toughest technology challenges. AT&T will work with Coral’s Communications Industry Platform (CIP) team to identify and invest in start-up companies focused on connected services and platforms. **

“This investment is part of our push to address the needs of global service providers,” said Andre Fuetsch, chief technology officer and president of AT&T Labs. “We look forward to collaborating with Coral and other CIP members to find – and even create – startup companies to build disruptive technologies to solve these challenges.”

“The CIP solutions are targeted at large, move-the-needle opportunities initiated by our strategic collaborators,” said Yuval Almog, chairman and founder of Coral Group. “We are pleased to welcome AT&T to the CIP.”

The fund will invest in technologies that run on the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). ONAP is an operating system for software-defined networks. It was born of a merger between a platform created in AT&T Labs and an existing effort in open source. It is being used to manage the company’s own cloud network. ONAP is now an open source platform hosted by the Linux Foundation. It is quickly becoming the standard for virtualized networks around the world.

AT&T and Coral will identify additional companies to invest in the fund. The CIP members can pool their resources to create innovations to address vital problems.

This investment represents AT&T’s latest innovation program, including AT&T Labs and the AT&T Foundry innovation centers. The centers were launched in 2011 in part to work closely with the startup and open source communities.