Tech start-ups across the world may be seeing red, but trust Amber Networks to beat the lights. The Fremont, California-based firm, co-founded and led by a group of Indian silicon gurus has been acquired by communications giant Nokia for $421 million in a market roiled by inflated values and depressed earnings.

The all-stock deal sends out a clear message that start-ups with cutting edge technology are still coveted by the giant corporations looking to clamber out of the downturn. Meet the newest kids on the networking highway. Amar Gupta, 44, co-founder and chief technology officer, and Sam Mathan, 55, president and chief executive officer, of Amber Networks, a company seeded by Silicon Valley's well-known serial entrepreneur Prakash Bhalerao, who is also its chairman. The genesis of Amber was an idea, a desire and a need "to do something" in the networking arena shares equally by Bhalerao and Gupta a few years ago. "In 1998, when it became clear to us that optics was going to be the future of telecommunications, we decided to start the company," reveals Gupta. "The idea and its final avatar in the form of a network edge aggregation router followed subsequently." Adds Mathan: "Right form the beginning, Amber wanted to be a dominant player in the market.

Nokia executives said the acquisition of Amber and its expertise in developing fault tolerant routers will help the company shape future mobile network architecture. Nokia is developing a new carrier grade routing platform for the Intelligent Edge under the name of FlexiGateway. By combining our existing mobile IP-routing capabilities with those of Amber Networks, we are establishing a leading team of engineers to create the first fault-tolerant routing platform in our market,'' a senior Nokia executive said.

Amber's routers move voice and data across communication networks more efficiently. In the early days of the Internet, voice and data came from disparate systems such as TDM, frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and IP. Amber's routers sit between the optical core, where traffic is routed as bits of light, and the messy, smaller local networks where traffic is carried in any number of arcane fashions, and streamline all these confusing standards into one seamless network.

Amar Gupta holds 12 patents in high-speed and real-time communication network and architecture design. A BTech from Karnataka Regional Engineering College (Suratkal), Gupta came to the US in 1980 to pursue his Master's programme at the University of Alabama. This he cleared in a year. "I was a first ranker through out my academic career," says Gupta. "The distance between me and the second-ranker was always huge."

After working for four years at Data Point from 1981 to 1984, Gupta joined DEC, where he met his future mentor and investor Bhalerao. Gupta spent seven years here before moving to the Valley where he initially joined a startup. "It was in this company that I first realised the huge business opportunities in wide area networks," confesses Gupta. However, he left the company's business model was not in sync with the market" - to join StrataCom in 1992 (later acquired by Cisco) where he was one of the key developers of a series of packet switches including BPX switch, MGX-8220 (AXIS multi-service concentrator) and MGX-8850 (Popeye). Gupta left Cisco, where he had reached the position of director of engineering, in 1999 to start Amber Networks.

While Gupta was a networking wizard, CEO Mathan came armed with a 25-year career in the telecommunication industry. Born in Hyderabad, Mathan came to the US in 1970 with two bachelor's degrees under his belt from Osmania University, and secured a Master's in electronics from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Southern Methodist, Dallas, Texas. "I worked at several companies after completing my studies, primarily running their engineering departments," says Mathan. "But it was beginning to get boring and tiring." After 15 years of professional experience, Mathan co-founded a company in Dallas in 1987, engaged in the remote transfer of images. The company failed to make a mark, even though the concept was interesting, mainly because "the communication infrastructure at the time was not capable of handling the bandwidth".

Mathan migrated to California in 1990 to work with Pacific Bell, where he acquired hands-on experience of American telecommunication companies. There he directed the product management and marketing team responsible for PacBell's first series of network integration products and services. "It was very exciting then to be on the inside track of developing new networking technologies," reminisces Mathan. "However, the market was beginning to be characterized by fierce and high-stake competition."

The real challenge, however, came four years later, when Mathan left Pacific Bell to join Ascend Communications, valued at $24 billion and later acquired by Lucent Technologies. Mathan helped the company establish itself as a dominant supplier of dial access, frame and cell switching equipment to RBOCS, IXC and the emerging carriers. "This assignment carried me deep into network servers," says Mathan, who left Ascend on 2 January 2000, to join Amber Networks. His reason: "Amber was beginning to create a brand new market, which was an exciting challenge. Moreover, I was impressed by its management team."

Amber Networks has some 220 employees and the company has successfully raises $120 million. Investors in the company include Invesco Capital, Excel Partners, ITV, Piquat, CMC, the Government of Singapore, a slew of investment banks including Morgan Stanley, and some carriers such as Williams Communications, Enron and Toshiba. The market for the company's edge router' device, to be shipped by first quarter of 2001, is estimated to be $22 billion by 2003, according to Ryan Hankin Kent, a telecommunications market research and consulting firm. "Communication infrastructure is rapidly moving to IP (Internet Protocol) as the protocol of choice for building new networks, and our products aggregate current legacy traffic and move it on to the IP service layer at optical speeds," Mathan explains.

Mathan is fascinated by speeds. A car enthusiast, he currently has SL 500 Mercedes, S 500 Mercedes, CLK 430 Mercedes and a Moderna 360 Ferrari in his stable. "I love driving fast cars. My average speed is 100 miles an hour and I have peaked at 185 miles," claims Mathan proudly. Married to Shanti, the couple has a son Satish, a doctor, and daughter Sareena, studying at the University of North Carolina. Mathan and Shanti are avid collectors of Indian art.

Gupta, on the other hand, loves travel and sports, though he immediately confesses that over the past decade, his leisure activities have dwindled substantially. "I am increasingly getting involved in family activities rather than individual activities like tennis and baseball which I loved once." He likes swimming and hiking with his children-daughter Anita 14, and son Amit, 11- and loves listen to wife Padmini, an acclaimed classical singer. "Right now, however, I am spending more time fine-tuning our products as Amber," says Gupta who foresees an IPO for Amber Networks in the next 15 months, and is confident of making his company heard in the international marketplace