DriveNets, the networking software company, announced that it has raised $208 million in a Series B funding round that brings DriveNets' valuation to more than $1 billion. The company will use the investment to continue to offer service providers and hyperscalers a radical new way to build their networks with higher capacity and scale at a much lower cost. DriveNets Network Cloud is already deployed as the core routing solution for AT&T, one of the largest networks in the world, demonstrating the scale and efficiency of a fully virtualized, disaggregated network. The funding will also allow DriveNets to expand to new geographies, responding to the surge in demand for more connectivity and infrastructure that can be easily scaled in a cloud-native fashion.

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.

DriveNets Network Cloud uniquely supports the complete virtualization of network and compute resources, enabling communication service providers and cloud providers to meet increasing service demands much more efficiently than with today's monolithic routers. DriveNets' software runs over standard white box hardware and can easily scale network capacity by adding additional white boxes into physical network clusters. This unique disaggregated network model enables the physical infrastructure to operate as a shared resource that supports multiple networks and services. It detaches network growth from cost, increasing network profitability. 

"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."

Founded in 2016 by Ido Susan and Hillel Kobrinsky, two successful telco entrepreneurs, DriveNets' goal is to accelerate network growth, improve network economics and enable the delivery of new services at the network edge. DriveNets runs on standard white boxes based on merchant silicon, opening the traditionally locked networking market to more players and services. This approach has succeeded in lowering the cost per bit and improving network profitability. The unique network design also allows faster service innovation at the Network Edge, supporting multiple service payloads, including latency-sensitive ones, over a single physical network edge.