Caltech-Spawned Rainfinity Completes $15 Million Second Round Venture Capital Financing.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 2, 1999--

Funds from NEA and Alloy Ventures to Accelerate

Commercialization of Company's Technology for

Maximizing Internet Availability and Performance

Software Already in Use at BellSouth, NASA, Chicago Stock Exchange,

Dresdner Bank and Other Major Companies

Rainfinity(TM), which provides software solutions that improve the reliability and performance of the Internet infrastructure, announced today that it has completed a second round of financing totaling over $15 million. A majority of the funding was provided by venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates (NEA) of Menlo Park, CA, and Alloy Ventures of Palo Alto, CA, with additional backing contributed by existing Rainfinity investors. Rainfinity was founded by a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and leading Internet business executives. The company will apply the new funds directly to building its marketing and sales structure in order to rapidly expand the use of its solution in the global Internet marketplace.

"We welcome NEA and Alloy Ventures who join Caltech and our founders as principal equity holders in Rainfinity. Their investment reflects confidence in our unique technology and its high level of customer acceptance," said Dr. Shuki Bruck, Rainfinity's chairman and Caltech professor.

According to David Pidwell of Alloy Ventures, "From the beginning, we have been captivated by the elegance of Rainfinity's solution to the Internet reliability issue. We believe the company has enormous potential to become a major player in the further evolution and expansion of the Internet's infrastructure."

Tom McConnell, general partner of NEA, commented, "As more businesses move to the Internet, questions of continuous availability and performance will be paramount among ISPs, e-commerce providers, VPNs, intranets and extranets, as well as other mission critical online operations. Rainfinity's software is the most complete answer yet to those concerns, and we are extremely positive about its prospects."

Rainfinity's core technology, RAIN(TM), is a patent-pending clustering technology that was conceived and developed by a team of Caltech scientists. The company's founders worked in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop a superior distributed clustering technology for space-borne computing systems. The Caltech team formed Rainfinity to bring this technology to the commercial market, focusing on applying RAIN's exceptional availability, performance and scalability characteristics to mission-critical Internet applications.

"Completing second round financing is a critical milestone for any company in the fast-moving Internet space," said Gil Margalit, Rainfinity's president. "Unlike many firms at this stage of their development, however, Rainfinity is in the fortunate position of currently delivering a proven technology that is operational with major corporations such as BellSouth, NASA, The Chicago Stock Exchange and Dresdner Bank, among others.

Rainwall(TM), Rainfinity's flagship software product introduced in April 1999, is the first fully distributed gateway clustering solution for the Internet, and the first clustering solution to simultaneously address the three most critical issues affecting the Internet, namely availability, performance and scalability. When Rainwall detects a hardware or software failure, it automatically shifts traffic to a healthy gateway, reconfiguring seamlessly without any interruption of service. Rainwall is a software only solution and no special hardware or dedicated heartbeat network is required.

In May of this year, Rainwall was named a finalist in the Network Security and Performance category of the "Best of Show Awards" by CMP Media's Data Communications and Internet Week. Rainwall also holds the OPSEC Certification from Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP). The OPSEC Certification assures seamless compatibility between Rainwall and Check Point(TM) FireWall-1(R) and VPN-1(TM) network security gateways, providing customers with a fully distributed enterprise security solution that is scaleable, non-interruptible and load-balanced.

Norbert Schaar, Director of Global IT Services for Dresdner Bank said, "We have installed multiple Rainwall driven firewall clusters for Dresdner Bank AG itself and several subsidiaries worldwide. The Rainfinity firewall clusters ensure transparent failover, permanent availability and load balancing -- very basic requirements for IT applications and communications connections in the banking and investment areas.

"Dresdner Bank Group is planning to roll-out many more of these clusters to our locations and subsidiaries throughout the world in the next few years," he added.

From the outset, Rainfinity's vision has been to provide mission-critical Internet applications with a technology that alleviates any performance and communications bottlenecks and ensures an Internet site's ability to maintain uninterrupted service 24/7. Rainwall has been its entry point into this market. Future products will expand on its core technology to meet the evolving needs of Web servers and other critical components of the Internet infrastructure.

"We see absolutely no reason why the Internet cannot be as reliable as the telephone," Mr. Margalit concluded. "For too long, people have had low expectations of Internet reliability based on past experience. While the number of network interruptions is declining, they still exist, and people today are more impatient and less willing to tolerate problem delays and system failures. Our solution will prevent them."

About Rainfinity: Rainfinity designs, develops and markets scalable, high-availability, maximum performance solutions for mission-critical Internet servers and gateways. Through its unique distributed server clustering technology, Reliable Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN), Rainfinity alleviates performance communications bottlenecks and ensures uninterrupted service. The company's corporate headquarters is located at 1901 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA. For more information, please call (877) RAIN-333, or visit http://www.rainfinity.com.

About New Enterprise Associates (NEA): NEA manages over $2 billion in capital and has been practicing early stage venture financing for 21 years. Since the firm's inception in 1978, 124 NEA portfolio companies have gone public with 18 completing their IPOs in 1999. NEA has been a founding investor in a number of successful companies including Ascend Communications, COM21, Gadzoox Networks, Fibex Systems, Juniper Networks, Packeteer and UUNET Technologies. In addition to Rainfinity, NEA's recent investments in the communications sector include Accelerated Networks, Astral Point Communications, Force 10, Mayan Networks and Quantum Bridge Communications.

About Alloy Ventures: Alloy Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm whose partners have been investing in startup companies for 22 years. Alloy's team has invested in a wide array of companies spanning data communications such as AMCC, Alacritech, PacketCom Web servers such (Auspex); voice communications (Aspect, Latitude and Nuance); Web communities (AllAdvantage.com, Zing Network, Sapient/WebMD, InPart/Parametric); enterprise software (Remedy, Verity), and Web infrastructure (Personify, BoldFish).