DriveNets announces key investors for its $117M round of funding

Israel-based DriveNets announced on Monday that several high profile strategic investors have taken part in its $117 million Series A round of funding.

 

DriveNets emerged from stealth mode in February with $110 million in Series A funding, but Monday's announcement identified some of the key investors plus the additional $7 million.

 

The founding round investors included Steve Luczo, chairman of the board of Seagate and its former CEO, Mark McLaughlin, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks, and John Thompson, chairman of the board of Microsoft.  Luczo also landed a seat on DriveNets' board of directors.

 

Other key strategic investors include C4 Ventures, the fund created and led by Pascal Cagni, former general manager and vice president for Apple EMEIA, Doug Gilstrap, former CEO and COO of global data telecom companies and former head of strategy for Ericsson, and Benny Schnaider. Schnaider is an Israeli entrepreneur with six startup exits to date, including two that were sold to Cisco. 

 

“Our investors are industry leaders in some of the greatest technology companies in the world. They have disrupted industries and built multi-billion-dollar companies. We are proud that they have put their trust in us. Their broad experience and business knowledge will guide us as we grow our company and scale our reach, as well as help us to better serve our customers,” said Ido Susan, DriveNets’ CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “We are also delighted to have Steve Luczo join our board and we will benefit from his experience and hands-on involvement in our business growth.”

 

RELATED: DriveNets says its 400G white box routing software is in testing with a Tier 1 telco

 

In April, DriveNets announced its 400G virtual router was being tested and certified by an unnamed Tier 1 telco. In what it claimed was an industry first, DriveNets' Network Cloud software-based disaggregated router has added 400G-port routing support.

 

In order to keep pace with increasing bandwidth demands due to video consumption and the low latencies that 5G will need, service providers, such as Verizon and AT&T, have been hot on the trail of 400G.

 

Network Cloud uses cloud-native routing software to support new functions in the underlying white-box hardware. DriveNets, which emerged from stealth mode in February with a $110 round of funding, said the vision behind Network Cloud was to simplify and scale service providers' rollout of 5G and other new services.

 

DriveNets' routing software supports a packet-forwarding white box based on Broadcom's Jericho2 chipset, which has high-speed, high-density port interfaces of 100G and 400G.

According to DriveNets, Network Cloud is the only router on the market designed to scale 100/400G ports up to performance of 768Tb, which it says could form the highest capacity router on the market.

 

By taking cloud features to the network, instead of vice versa, Network Cloud can run the routing data plane on white-boxes and the control plane on standard servers, which separates the network cost from capacity growth. Network Cloud can run any network function as a microservice on the same distributed hardware infrastructure. Its cloud-native capabilities include zero touch provisioning, full life cycle management and automation as well as diagnostics.