DriveNets – a vendor of cloud-native networking solutions – today announced a $262 million Series C venture capital funding round, which brings the total funding raised in its three rounds to $587 million.
The funding from this latest round will be used to develop future technology solutions, pursue new business opportunities, and expand the company’s global operations and support teams.
The Series C round was led by the D2 investment consortium, along with the participation of DriveNets’ current investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Pitango, D1, Atreides Management and Harel Insurance Investments & Financial Services.
The company first drew headlines in 2020 when AT&T said it was using DriveNets to provide core-network routing software.
A spokesperson today said that in addition to AT&T, DriveNets technology is in production with several of the largest Tier-1 operators in North America and Asia and is in various stages of engagement with nearly 100 service providers around the world.
The DriveNets’ network infrastructure platform — Network Cloud — is not limited to core routing. It can run a variety of network routing services where networks meet other networks, such as in large colocation facilities, internet peering sites, aggregation sites and access sites. Run Almog, head of product strategy at DriveNets, has previously explained to Fierce that traditionally each routing service was handled by dedicated machines. “From our perspective all of these are services,” he said. Network Cloud collapses to a unified infrastructure with software to have as a cloud orchestrator."
The DriveNets spokesperson today said the company started by supporting core networking, which was widely deployed at AT&T, but it has expanded to support the rest of the use cases. “Today many of DriveNets’ customers use DriveNets Network Cloud for edge, aggregation and peering,” he said. “Some of our largest deployments today are in the edge of the network.”
Network Cloud allows service providers to run multiple networks in separate software containers over a shared physical infrastructure of standard networking white boxes.
“DriveNets’ approach of building networks like cloud allows telecom providers to take advantage of technological efficiencies available to cloud hyperscalers, such as cloud-native software design and optimal utilization of shared resources across multiple services,” said Ido Susan, DriveNets founder and CEO, in a statement today.
The company now counts about 450 employees worldwide and expects to reach 500 employees by the end of the year. In addition to its main headquarters in Israel, it has a large R&D team in Romania, sales offices in the U.S. and Japan, and local teams across the U.S., Canada, Spain, France, UK, Germany, Turkey, India, Australia and Taiwan.