The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners of the United States, included new investors such as Bank of America BAC.N Securities, China Development Investment Bank, Dell Computer Corp DELL.O , Gemini Israel Funds, Jerusalem Global Ventures, Walden Israel Venture Capital, JNI Corp JNIC.O and Sun Microsystems SUNW.O .

Previous investors also participating in this round included Intel INTC.O Capital, Sequoia Capital and Vitesse Semiconductor VTSS.O .

The latest round brings total investment in Mellanox to more than $89 million.

Mellanox said it will use the funds to develop future generations of its product lines based on the InfiniBand standard.

"Even during tough economic conditions, enterprises will continue to adopt cost-effective technologies like InfiniBand, which offer significant performance, ease of management and reliability benefits," said Rob Chandra of Bessemer Ventures.

Randy Groves, vice president of the enterprise systems group at Dell, said Dell believes InfiniBand will be a key technology in the future of industry standard servers.

Mellanox has shipped its products to about 70 companies.

"A number of these customers are moving into production today and we expect them to ramp to high volume quantities in the second half of 2002 and in 2003," Mellanox Chairman and Chief Executive Eyal Waldman said in a statement.

Mellanox said it was selected last year by Red Herring Magazine as one of the 50 most important private companies in the world. Its business operations, sales and customer support are in California while its design and engineering operations are in Israel.