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February - 2015 - issue > Venture Chakra
Pluribus Networks Raises $50 Million in Funding
SI Team
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Pluribus Networks, a software-defined networking (SDN) startup, providing performance-oriented network virtualization for private and public cloud datacenters, landed a $50 million series D investment round. The startup now has $95 million in total funding.

Founded by Kumar Srikantan, President and CEO, and Sunay Tripathi, CTO, at the core of Pluribus Networks's technology is its network hypervisor called Netvisor, which acts as a distributed operating system that spans multiple switches throughout the data center. With Netvisor installed in a company's data center, users can coordinate network traffic by using Netvisor to tether together all of the switch hardware devices and enable the switches to be understood as one big device.
It's parallel to some of the other offerings from other software defined storage startups. Many of these startups tout technology that links the various storage arrays in a data center so they can be read as one big device that can be configured to better accommodate the needs of an application.
Tripathi believes that his startup is different from other SDN startups. While these entities have followed the promise of SDN by separating the data plane from the control plane, Pluribus Networks believes that the centralized SDN controller should not be separate from the switch.
OpenStack users should be able to connect the OpenStack controller with the Netvisor hypervisor so that when the OpenStack controller calls for the overall system to create a virtual load balancer or similar virtual appliance, "all of that gets extenuated on the switch hypervisors," he said.
Pluribus's customer base includes Tibco, CloudFlare and Lucera as well.
Temasek Holdings, drove this new founding round along with Ericsson, Newtech New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures.

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