SDN Startup Pluribus Networks Raises $50M for Open Application Platform

Software-defined networking (SDN) startup Pluribus Networks on Wednesday announced it has raised $50 million in funding for its open application platform.

Temasek Holdings led the Series D funding round, with participation from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow and AME Cloud Ventures. This financing round brings the Palo Alto, California-based company’s total financing to date to $95 million.

The company plans to use the additional funds to grow its sales, business development and engineering teams to support growing customer demand.

“All signs point to growing understanding of our Netvisor architecture and analytics and virtualization capabilities, and wanted to be able to hit this market inflection point,” said Dave Ginsburg, CMO at Pluribus. “We’ll wanted to grow marketing for awareness and credibility, and we wanted to grow engineering to deliver on our Netvisor product line and vision.”

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Based on open architecture, the company’s Netvisor OS is a distributed bare-metal network hypervisor that brings together the Pluribus product portfolio.

Ginsburg stated that the additional funds will also expand the company’s channel efforts by growing its sales in North America and footprint in Southeast Asia.

“By growing marketing and kicking-off channel marketing programs in the regions, we will build brand preference and, therefore, make it easier for the channel to position Pluribus as a differentiated offering versus commodity and legacy vendors,” he said. “Additional engineers will help to better realize the ‘complete product’ that more fully aligns to repeatable SDN use cases that generate real financial returns for CIOs”

Pluribus will be announcing a new channel chief in the near future, Ginsburg said.

In a previous interview with Talkin’ Cloud, Pluribus Networks CEO Kumar Srikantan said his plan for the company is to redefine the SDN landscape.

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