In the shadow of talk of the crisis: the Israeli startup DriveNets announces a new fundraising of 262 million dollars that will all go into the company’s coffers, and another amount of millions of dollars as a secondary
Source: Pexels
While the headlines are talking about a “crisis” in high-tech and the end of the golden age of Israeli high-tech, today (Wed) another Israeli startup announces a mega-funding as if the year is 2021.
Almost half a billion in two years
The Israeli startup DriveNets announced the completion of a C funding round of $262 million. This is after he raised $208 million in 2021 and entered the unicorn club. The fundraising was led by D2 Investments with the participation of Bessemer, Pitango, D1, Atreides and Harel Insurance. According to information obtained by Gigtime, all current recruitment funds will go directly to the company’s coffers, but at the same time, the company did hold a secondary round for employees before that, similar to its other rounds. DriveNets is estimated to have more than doubled its value in those two years, with tens of millions of dollars in revenue and hundreds of millions of dollars in orders.
In order to route the exponential amounts of information and operate the existing networks, the communication providers purchase huge and very expensive routing solutions for them. This means that in order to meet the demand, their profitability will be affected or they will have to raise funds from other sources, usually from the customers who will suffer an increase in prices. To avoid this situation, the DriveNets product actually transfers the network routing to the cloud and thus the provider’s hardware is less important.
Photography: Lior Nir
Using the company’s software, you can build one common infrastructure that can run any communication service, anywhere, and at any volume. In fact, the company boasts that carriers can use simple, generic and cheap hardware, with its architecture allowing the volume of network traffic to grow linearly by adding simple hardware units. In practice, the architecture allows support for a single router at a rate of 4Tb/s up to one “white box” router cluster, which supports a rate of 768Tb/s – and can support 7,680 G100 ports each. Additional advantages of this architecture are simplicity – because there are fewer different technologies and products on the way – and of course a security aspect. After all, you want as few links in the chain as possible, any of which could become the victim of a weakness or attack and bring down the entire network in its wake.
DriveNets was founded in 2015 by Ido Sosan and Hillel Kobrinsky, two entrepreneurs with impressive exits behind them: Sosan, who serves as the company’s CEO, was one of the founders of Intucell, a company that created automatic optimization solutions for cellular networks and was acquired by Cisco in 2013 for $475 million when he was only a boy 26. Kobrinsky co-founded Interwise, a conferencing service provider, which was acquired in 2007 by telecommunications giant AT&T for $121 million. Today DriveNets employs over 450 people in Israel, the USA, Japan and Romania.
Idan Ben Tovim
Born with a joystick in his hand. He has far too many gadgets and far too little free time to play with them all. Has an unexplained hammer for performing instrument battery calibrations. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it, and a lot
