Israeli networking software company DriveNets has emerged from stealth and announced a first financing round of $110 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Pitango Growth, and with the participation of a number of private investors. The financing round was carried out at a company valuation of more than $500 million, according to sources close to the deal.
Ra'anana-based DriveNets seeks to create a paradigm shift for telecom service provider networks as demand for services soar but customers are not paying more, so profits are shrinking.
Combining technological innovation with a unique business model, DriveNets' Network Cloud solution disrupts network economics. This is achieved by disconnecting network cost from capacity growth and allowing telecom providers to handle skyrocketing demand without sacrificing profitability. Network Cloud radically simplifies network operations, as it can create any network function from the same software stack and only two generic hardware building blocks. As the entire infrastructure is software-centric, Network Cloud accelerates new service rollouts at full network scale.
DriveNets was founded in 2015 by CEO Ido Susan and chief strategy officer Hillel Kobrinsky and to date has been self-funded. Both founders have lucrative exits to their name: Susan previously cofounded self-optimizing network company Intucell, which was sold to Cisco for $475 million while Kobrinsky founded web conference specialist Interwise, which was sold to AT&T for $121 million. The company has 150 employees and plans to expand to 200 employees by the end of 2018.
DriveNets signed its first major contract in 2017 with a tier-1 North American service provider, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. More deals have been signed with US and European telcos and 2019 revenue is expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The latest financing will fuel DriveNets' ambitious growth plans, as it expands its product portfolio and penetrates new markets worldwide.
Susan told "Globes," "This is meant to be the company's only financing round. We plan an IPO in the coming years."
Susan added, "We believe Network Cloud will become the networking model of the future. We've challenged many of the assumptions behind traditional routing infrastructures and created a technology that will allow service providers to address their biggest challenges like the exponential capacity growth, 5G deployments and low-latency AI applications."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on February 15, 2019
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2019