Clearly, a major service outage last week did little to spook  the VCs who have decided to put $25 million into SunRocket. The company, which describes itself as "the second fastest growing independent provider of residential Internet phone service", has tapped Mayfield Fund, Doll Capital Management and its existing investors - BlueRun Ventures and Anthem Capital Management. SunRocket has now raised a total of $34-million. “SunRocket is poised to explode as a household name in a category that is transforming consumer telecom, and we couldn’t be more enthusiastic about the opportunity,” gushed Dixon Doll, co-founder and managing general partner of Doll Capital. (Update: Doll Capital is also leading an $8.75-million Series A investment in BitTorrent)
Not sure how to read the SunRocket investment. It may suggest investors are emboldened (enamoured?) by the eBay-Skpe deal and still believe there is room for independent VOIP service providers amid the cable and carrier giants. One key would be valuation and the ROI formula. If the VCs are getting a big chunk of SunRocket for a relatively modest amount of money, making a bet on a VOIP service provider may have much less risk if the market continues to grow as expected. Then again, if you think Vonage is about to get squeezed out of the VOIP market, what are SunRocket's chances?
Just out of curiosity, I checked out Mayfield's other communication service investments. They include Mobile365, which offers wireless access and content distribution, and MobileAria, which develops mobile technology for fleet management and security services. Doll's communications investments include InterNap, which providesr usiness customers high performance IP services through a portfolio of Internet-based solutions, and Neutral Tandem, an independent provider of inter-carrier transit and switched access services.