Israeli telecom-software firm DriveNets emerges from stealth with $110M

DriveNets announced its first round of financing to the tune of $110 million. The announcement marked the end of the networking-software startup's two-year-plus self-funded stealth mode.

Applying network-as-a-service concepts to the service-provider market, the Israel-based company's solution, Network Cloud, purports to have a scalable software stack for traffic routing that offers management tools and cost visibility—all while running on white boxes developed in partnership with Broadcom and Foxconn. The company already counts a North American Tier-1 provider as a customer that, according to DriveNets co-founder and CEO Ido Susan, generates an eight-figure revenue stream.

"We believe Network Cloud will become the networking model of the future," said Susan in a prepared statement. "We've challenged many of the assumptions behind traditional routing infrastructures and created a technology that will allow service providers to address their biggest challenges like the exponential capacity growth, 5G deployments and low-latency AI applications."

Leading the funding round were Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) and Pitango Growth. DriveNets is keeping mum on the valuation figure, but TechCrunch is reporting that it may be "several hundred million dollars."

BVP has funded Susan before. In 2011, the VC firm bought a greater than 50% stake in Intucell, a self-optimizing network software company that Susan founded in 2008. Two years later, Cisco bought Intucell for $475 million. Now, DriveNets appears to be directly competing with Cisco in its attempts to disrupt legacy routing solutions.