Pluribus Networks Raises $50M in Funding
Pluribus Networks announced today that it has raised US$50 million in a Series D round of funding led by Temasek Holdings, an investment company based in Singapore with a net portfolio value of US$177 billion. This up-round brought the Pluribus total funding to date to US$95M million, making it the best-funded SDN company in the industry. All of the existing investors, including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow and AME Cloud Ventures, participated in the round.
Furthermore, the company added new global strategic investors, including Ericsson, as well as Newtech, a leading turnkey datacenter infrastructure provider in Asia. Funds will be used for the expansion of sales, marketing, business development and engineering to support the rapidly growing customer demand for the company’ products and services.
“We are excited to have Temasek Holdings, a marquis investment company with global presence, as well as Ericsson, a global player in the telecom and service provider cloud infrastructure segment participate in this investment round in Pluribus Networks,” said Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!, lead investor of AME Cloud Ventures and the first investor in Pluribus Networks.
“The Pluribus architecture speaks to the needs of the Global 2000 companies represented at the Open Networking User Group,” said Nick Lippis, co-chairman of ONUG. “Hardware independence coupled with a secure and programmable SDN platform, offering scale, automated configuration, operational simplicity, and open standards are key working group requirements being addressed by the Pluribus Netvisor Operating System.”
“Pluribus is one of the few companies in the IT infrastructure space that has taken a platform approach to deliver on the promise of SDN network programmability, operational simplicity and unification of the economic model of computing and networking,” said Kittu Kolluri, general partner, NEA. “We are pleased to be able to help catalyze the company’s execution and look forward to its expansion in the next few months as the best funded and most innovative SDN startup in the market.”
“Fundamentally, the sea has changed and CIOs are turning away from endless hardware upgrade cycles to a software and network-application-centric view,” said Kumar Srikantan, president and CEO of Pluribus Networks. “With our Netvisor, we have a superior, converged SDN platform that not only provides better scale and performance, but also enables virtualization and security while driving down cost and complexity. The funding we are announcing today validates our architecture approach and the breakaway growth potential of the company.”
