Nile, a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to announced its intention to offer AI-enabled campus networking solutions based on Zero Trust Network principles.
Although product specifics have yet been disclosed, Nile said it has taken a clean sheet approach a relentless focus on disruptive simplicity. The mission is defined by “an audacious vision to remove human dependence from management of the network.” Nile’s cloud-native design includes deep physical and virtual instrumentation that provides continuous monitoring, extensive analytics, and AI/ML-driven automation.
Nile was founded by Pankaj Patel, formerly former EVP and Chief Development Officer at Cisco, and John Chambers, the former Executive Chairman and CEO at Cisco. The company is backed by $125 million in funding from March Capital, 8VC, JC2 Ventures, and ICONIQ, among others. It already has 170 employees and says it will have 50+ partners in place at time of launch, including network ecosystem leaders like Presidio and CBTS.
“This journey is all about a once in a decade opportunity to create something disruptive — not just for the sake of disruption — but to create something that can resolve the complexity of networking and deliver simple access to a very reliable, extremely high-performance network – and we’ve done it,” said Pankaj Patel, CEO, and co-founder of Nile. “Why is that important? Because while the world has changed, networking largely hasn’t. Of the $25 billion in hardware spent each year in wired and wireless access technology, we estimate another $75 billion is spent in operations. This simply isn’t sustainable, yet the entrenched incumbents have not responded, with business models, ecosystems, and an installed base to protect and they’d have to completely re-engineer their own existing platforms. Nile changes that – now watch us grow.”
“Our currency is very simple: We have the track record, we have the relationships, and we have the trust that almost nobody else has in the network industry,” said John Chambers, co-founder of Nile, and founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. “This is a market that is ripe for disruption because the traditional players have lost track of where they are, slowly evolving their products, adding immense complexity, and they kept doing the same things for far too long. The incumbents have missed what the real customer desire is: simplicity. Nile enters the market with the license and the experience to disrupt the status quo.”
