Pluribus
Networks, the company that brings together computer, network, storage
and virtualization into a single, open and programmable SDN platform, 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."