Avi Networks, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, announced $60 million in new funding including investments from Cisco Investments along with DAG Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures.
Cisco resells the Avi Vantage Platform in markets around the world, and Avi closely integrates with Cisco ACI, Cisco’s intent-based networking and automation solution for the data center.
Avi Networks offers an application delivery controller (ADC) with a Software Load Balancer, an Intelligent Web Application Firewall, and an Elastic Service Mesh for container-based applications. The company says that as businesses shift their operations to clouds such as Azure and AWS, its intent-based software offers easier management, faster performance, greater elasticity, deeper analytics, and more powerful automation than legacy ADC vendors.
Avi also reports that it has tripled its bookings over the past year, with significant adoption by the Global 2000 and 20% of the Fortune 50.
This latest round brings Avi’s total funding to $115 million.
“Modern applications are driving a new urgency with which enterprises are automating their networks and application delivery systems,” said Amit Pandey, CEO of Avi Networks. “Cisco software and infrastructure are a cornerstone in this transformation. I am thrilled about this strategic investment from Cisco and our continued joint efforts to deliver the elasticity, intelligence, and multi-cloud capabilities that enterprises need.”
- Avi Networks is headed by Amit Pandey, who joined the company as CEO in 2015. Previously, Pandey spent nearly a decade at NetApp in a wide range of executive positions, and followed that with two successful stints at startups – first as CEO of TerraCotta that was acquired by the European software giant, Software AG and next as CEO of Zenprise that was acquired by Citrix.
- Avi Networks was co-founded in November 2012 by Umesh Mahajan, who previously was VP/GM of Data Center Switching at Cisco; Murali Basavaiah, who previously was VP Engineering at Cisco for NX-OS Software and Nexus 7000/MDS product; and Ranga Rajagopalan, who previously was Sr. Director of Engineering at Cisco and responsible for NX-OS systems/platform software for the Cisco Nexus 7000.