Ra’anana-based networking software unicorn DriveNets has raised $208 million in Series B funding to accelerate worldwide growth, the company announced last Wednesday.This funding brought the company's’ valuation to more than $1 billion, making DriveNets a 'unicorn,' referring to privately held start-up companies valued at over $1 billion.
The round was led by new investor D1 Capital Partners with significant follow-on investments from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Pitango. New investor Atreides Management also participated in the round. This investment will be used by the company to continue to offer service providers a radical new way to build their networks with higher capacity and scale at a much lower cost and to expand to new regions, responding to the surge in demand for more connectivity and infrastructure that can be easily scaled in a cloud-native fashion.The company aims to solve one of the greatest threats facing the telecommunications industry today: how to prevent profits slipping while demand for services is rapidly expanding, but customers are not paying more.
“Disaggregating the network architecture, as DriveNets has done at AT&T, demonstrates that DriveNets Network Cloud is changing the scale and economics of the most sophisticated networks in the world,” said Ido Susan, CEO and co-founder of DriveNets.“We are excited about the opportunities the future holds for us and have plans to disrupt more areas in the market. Our goal is to expand our product offerings and our reach to more leading operators and cloud providers.”
“We expect that DriveNets will continue rolling out transformative solutions and establish itself as a preeminent Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendor,” said Dan Sundheim, founder of D1 Capital Partners. “We are excited by DriveNets’ potential to dramatically change the architecture of this industry."
To ensure continued profitability, DriveNets’ Network Cloud software creates routing infrastructures that can grow linearly and run any service, at any scale from centralized clouds.
By using existing software stacks and “white box” hardware to create an on-demand infrastructure, communication service providers are able to handle increasing demand while keeping expenditure in check.
Since 2017, DriveNets’ technology has been used by a leading North American service provider, and the company has accrued revenues of tens of millions of dollars.Eytan Halon contributed to this report.