Pensando Systems, a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its first product — a software-defined edge services platform that was developed in collaboration with the world’s largest cloud, enterprise, storage, and telecommunications companies.
Pensando (“thinking” in Spanish) is led by Cisco’s legendary “MPLS” team — Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners led a Series C round to raise up to $145 million in funding. This will bring the total amount raised to $278 million after an earlier founder-led series A round of $71 million, and a customer-led series B round of $62 million. Cited customers, investors, and partners including HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp, and Equinix.
The Pensando platform is a custom programmable processor optimized to execute a software stack delivering cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services wherever data is located, all managed via its Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller. The platform delivers highly programmable software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage, and security services wherever data is located.
The platform promises an improved security posture through distributed network protection and east-west security. It offloads networking and security functions at wire speed to dedicated accelerators, and it is designed to scale to > 1000 tenants per server and >1M routes.
The company claims its capability means that cloud providers can now gain a technological advantage over the current market leader, Amazon Web Services Nitro, delivering 5-9x improvements in productivity, performance, and scale when compared to current architectures with no risk of lock-in.
The portfolio includes:
- Naples 100 and Naples 25 cards for installation in standard servers. The Naples Distributed Services Card (DSC) delivers high-performance cloud, compute, networking, storage and security functions.
- Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller – Centrally-managed enterprise-grade security and visibility at every level of the stack enables seamless distribution of all infrastructure services policies to active Naples nodes. In addition, Venice handles lifecycle management such as deploying in-service software upgrades to Naples nodes and delivers always-on telemetry, deep end-to-end observability, and operational simplicity across the environment.
“In less than 3 years we’ve assembled a best in class engineering team that are experts in building systems for the cloud, compute, networking, storage and security markets” said Prem Jain, CEO of Pensando Systems. “As a customer and partner first company we are focused on accelerating all aspects of our business as we go to market with a great ecosystem and a breakthrough platform.”
Pensando also announced that Mark Potter, chief technology officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Barry Eggers, a partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, joined the board of directors, with John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures, leading as chairman.
“It gives me great pleasure to welcome two new members to the Pensando board,” said John Chambers, Chairman of the Pensando Board of Directors. “I look forward to working closely with Mark and Barry as we focus on accelerating our operations and go-to-market activities.”
