Tellabs

In 1975, the story of Tellabs began around a kitchen table in a Chicago suburb, where Michael Birck and five partners brainstormed a new kind of telecommunications company. With $110,000 in capital, they aimed to build a business that tailored products to customer needs. The name Tellabs itself was a fusion of "telephones" and "laboratories." The company went public in 1980 and soon made its mark by introducing the industry's first commercially viable echo canceller in 1981, a device that improved call quality. This innovation, along with the 1984 breakup of the Bell System, created significant opportunities. A major breakthrough came in 1991 with the TITAN 5500 digital cross-connect system, which helped manage the rapidly growing traffic on telephone networks. The TITAN line became a massive success, fueling the company's growth throughout the decade. At the height of the dot-com boom, Tellabs' revenue soared, but the subsequent crash hit the company hard. After navigating the downturn, Tellabs was acquired in 2013 by the private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners for approximately $891 million. Following the acquisition, Marlin Equity merged Tellabs with Coriant and later spun off the Tellabs Access business, which now focuses on Optical LAN technology. Today, Tellabs continues to operate, specializing in optical network solutions for enterprise and government clients.