It's a triple play of announcements on Tuesday for white box startup Arrcus, including a $30 million Series B round of funding.
The oversubscribed round of funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and included full participation from existing investors General Catalyst and Clear Ventures.
The latest round brings San Jose, California-based Arrcus' total funding to $49 million, according to Arrcus CEO Devesh Garg. Garg said that while he wasn't ruling out future funding rounds, the company is set for the near term, and that the high profile of the investors speaks to Arrcus' prospects in the white box networking space.
"We are really excited to have a tier one VC like Lightspeed join the syndicate," Garg said. "They are one of the preeminent infrastructure venture capital firm investors in the world, so we're pretty, pretty excited to have them on board. I think it kind of goes without saying that when you're able to raise that amount of capital, oversubscribed, from all your existing investors and get a premier VC firm like Lightspeed, it's indicative of the aggregate progress that the team has made."
Arrcus was founded with the goal of creating an open, networking operating system that isn't locked into proprietary solutions such as the ones that are offered by Cisco and Arista Networks. Arrcus came out stealth mode last year with its vendor-agnostic networking and routing operating system, called ArcOS, that initially targeted data centers.
On Tuesday, Arrcus announced it has expanded the range of ArcOS to provide multiple high-density 100 GbE and 400 GbE routing capabilities for new use cases. The newest version of ArcOS is laying claim to being the first independent operating system that runs on Broadcom's 10 Tbps programmable StrataDNX Jericho2 switch-router system-on-a-chip. In a smaller form factor, Jericho2 silicon has five times the performance of previous Jericho+ processors along with four times the port density and scalablity.
"The second part of the announcement is taking the original vision of the company for democratizing networking and our open integration concept that we initially targeted into the IP-CLOS environment into an open integrated solution for routing," Garg said. "That's the first time that that's really happened in such an all-encompassing, pervasive manner. With that set of capabilities, we can we can further expand into hyperscale cloud, edge, and 5G network use cases, and we will continue to offer the most flexible consumption model, along with the lowest total cost of ownership across both capex and opex."
Garg said that Arrcus can't disclose the names of its customers, but they include large service providers, data centers, content delivery network customers and large enterprises. Garg said Arrcus' number paying customers are in the double digits, and there are five proof-of-concept trails with "large, well known customers focusing on customer adoption."
RELATED: Arrcus' OS makes the jump to 400G white box switches
In addition to competing with incumbents Cisco, Juniper Networks and Arista Networks, Arrcus also competes with startups such as DriveNets and Volta. Earlier this month, Israel-based DriveNets announced announced it had added $7 million to its $110 million Series A funding round. Both Arrcus and DriveNets announced their support for 400G white box routing and switching earlier this year.
Along with the upgraded operating system, Arrcus also announced on Tuesday a new AI-driven platform, ArcIQ, which offers real-time analytics and telemetry at scale for network operations centers (NOCs.) ArcIQ, which could be used for security, can be used in conjunction with ArcOS or as a standalone analytics element, according to Garg.
"While it stands on its own, when coupled with our ArcOS, were showcasing some secure control and data plane solutions as well with ArcIQ," Garg said. "So, with the funding, the new routing capabilities and the AI driven analytics platform, it's almost like a second company launch. We're very excited about it."