Network Elements Looks to Triple or Quintuple Space

PORTLAND-When a company has 100 employees, 100 job openings and 19,000 sf of space, its also has a busy broker. Such is the case for Network Elements, a Beaverton based startup that has just landed $77 million dollars in venture capital from a consortium of big-name investor-customers that include Cisco and Nortel Networks.

“We’re actively looking again and are in the process of narrowing our choices,” says Robert Alvarado, Network Element’s vice president of personnel, who expanded the company from 5,000-sf less than a year ago. “We hope to (lock down space) within this month.”

The new round of financing brings the company from the development stage to the mass production stage, meaning it’s going to need lots more people for engineering, manufacturing and sales and marketing. As a result, the maker of a next-generation junction box that processes fiber-optic light waves much faster than current solutions has employed Jeff Valdes of Hume Meyers Tenant Council to find it as much as 100,000 sf of lease space to hold its rapidly expanding operations.