The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Nov 2024

Aviz Networks develops AI-driven, vendor-agnostic networking software, including Community SONiC solutions, network visibility tools, and AI-driven management capabilities. Its Aviz AI Networking Stack offers orchestration, observability, real-time alerts, performance monitoring, RoCE support, packet brokers, service nodes, and a vendor-agnostic data lake powering an LLM-based Network Copilot. The stack integrates with the majority of ASICs, switches, GPUs, DPUs, and servers to provide customers hardware flexibility, operational control, and cost savings. Aviz’s solutions have been deployed by e-commerce platforms, telecommunications providers, retailers, GPU-as-a-service providers, cloud service providers, and diverse enterprise networks. The company plans to increase its workforce in the US and globally, further penetrate key sectors, and scale customer deployments while expanding its partner ecosystem. Aviz recently raised a $17 million Series A to accelerate market expansion and scale deployments. Aviz Networks is an open networking software company providing switch‑platform‑agnostic applications and APIs for network observability, orchestration, and assurance for cloud‑scale telecom and enterprise infrastructures. It offers disaggregated support for multi‑vendor SONiC deployments across data centers and edge networks. The company markets a multi‑vendor, GenAI‑based networking stack and intends to accelerate customer momentum and SONiC adoption. Aviz is led by CEO Vishal Shukla and is based in San Jose, CA. Financially, Aviz extended its funding to $10M with participation from Cisco Investments, Moment Ventures, Accton and Wistron. Over the past 12 months it has rapidly scaled customers, revenue, and operational headcount to meet increasing demand across multiple geographies. Aviz Networks provides software solutions for hybrid cloud and edge networks that leverage Multi‑Vendor SONiC. Its core offerings include the Aviz Certified SONiC program, an application‑driven support model with 24/7 SONiC experts, and cloud‑native applications for orchestration, monitoring, and support. Aviz has signed partnerships with all major switch and ASIC vendors to enable interoperable multi‑vendor networks and is making SONiC application‑aware to bring cloud‑native and AI capabilities to hybrid networks. The company cites deployments by a leading web‑scale enterprise customer that uses tens of thousands of devices and uses Aviz’s SONiC Enterprise Suite to manage their fabric. The founding team has backgrounds at Nvidia (Mellanox), AWS, and F5; Vishal Shukla is CEO, Chidambaram B is CTO, and Gautam Agrawal is CPO. Aviz’s stated vision is to drive open‑source networking via disaggregated cloud‑native applications and accelerate SONiC adoption across data center and edge networks.

Participated · Series C · Jan 2016

Big Switch Networks builds intelligent, automated and flexible networks for data center and cloud customers. The company offers two primary solutions: Big Monitoring Fabric, a network packet broker for pervasive security and monitoring of data center and cloud traffic, and Big Cloud Fabric, a switching fabric that supports choice of switching hardware for OpenStack, VMware, container and big data use cases. Leadership includes Founder Kyle Forster and CEO Douglas Murray. The company has offices in Tokyo, Melbourne, London and Istanbul in addition to its Santa Clara base. It has raised over $120M in total funding and plans to use new capital to drive further sales and product expansion. Big Switch Networks is a Santa Clara-based provider of hyperscale-inspired networking technologies for data centers. Its products include Big Monitoring Fabric, a next-generation network monitoring fabric, and Big Cloud Fabric, a data center fabric built using whitebox or britebox switches and an SDN controller. The Big Cloud Fabric is targeted at new data center pods such as OpenStack private cloud, VMware NSX, big data, and VDI. The company is led by CEO Douglas Murray and was founded by Kyle Forster. It serves customers across the US, APAC and EMEA in verticals including tech, financial services, government, service providers, and higher education. The company intends to use the new funds to continue to drive adoption and has secured $94M in total funding since 2010. Big Switch Networks builds software-defined networking products that provide an open architecture with a common data model, controller and open APIs. Its platform is based on the OpenFlow standard and aims to turn the data center into a programmable, software-driven stack. The company describes a three-tier architecture that works northbound with the application tier and southbound with the data plane tier. Big Switch has developed an ecosystem of providers including Juniper Networks, Arista and F5, alongside newer vendors such as Piston Cloud and Cloudscaling. Financially, it recently raised $6.5 million from Intel Capital, bringing total funding to $45 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint. The company competes against legacy incumbents like Cisco and evolving rivals such as VMware and Dell following VMware's acquisition of Nicira. Big Switch Networks provides a platform-independent SDN architecture that leverages industry standards and open APIs to enable network programmability and data center network virtualization. Its open SDN approach has fostered an ecosystem of physical and virtual switching partners and accelerated development of networking applications. Products are in customer trials today, and the company reports it has been generating revenue since inception. The company intends to use new funding to expand engineering, sales, and marketing teams and to hire additional top-tier talent to meet demand for production-ready SDN solutions. Management positions the platform as a disruptive alternative to closed, proprietary networking systems and aims to broaden industry adoption. Founded in March 2010, Big Switch previously closed a $14M Series A and continues to develop its open ecosystem to address datacenter networking limitations. Big Switch Networks is building a platform to virtualize enterprise networks based on the OpenFlow standard. The company plans to commercialize network virtualization technologies derived from Stanford University research to give network owners better control and optimization capabilities. It aims to become the 'VMware of networking for the private cloud'. Big Switch has joined the newly formed Open Networking Foundation to promote OpenFlow and other SDN technologies. The ONF was created by large network operators including Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo. The company was co-founded by Guido Appenzeller and Kyle Forster, and its board includes industry veterans such as Mark Leslie, Bill Meehan, Shirish Sathaye, and Mike Volpi.