SDN Vendor Plexxi Raises $35 Million

Plexxi, one of a broad array of smaller startups in the growing network virtualization space, has raised another $35 million in funding that will be used to boost the company’s efforts in everything from sales and marketing to customer support and R&D.

Plexxi officials announced the latest round of financing Sept. 14, saying it brings the total amount raised by the vendor since it was founded in 2010 to $83 million. The $35 million is coming from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, as well as an unnamed new investor, according to company officials.

CEO Rich Napolitano, who took the top job in November 2014, said the new funding adds to Plexxi’s three-prong push during the year, which not only includes getting the financing to accelerate the company’s growth, but also growing its list of partners and customers as well as building out its product portfolio.

“We are rapidly evolving Plexxi to keep pace with today’s competitive technology landscape,” Napolitano wrote in a post on the company blog.

The company offers both hardware and software designed to enable enterprises and cloud services providers to build agile, flat scale-out networks by bringing together the various switches used in data centers into a single system that is more easily managed. The goal is to create single-tier, low-latency infrastructures that can scale quickly and dynamically deploy the right resources to meet the demands of the workloads.

Most recently, Plexxi in July unveiled its Switch 2 Series, offerings that officials said collapse the network into a single tier that needs only one switch type and that is optimized for east/west traffic. The switches leverage Plexxi’s Control software-defined networking (SDN) controller and Connect application integration technologies to create networks aimed at environments that run scale-out, virtualized, mobile and big data applications.

“Switch 2 allows organizations to meet the demands of the next era of IT with a network that is more agile, scalable and intelligent,” the CEO wrote in his blog.

Plexxi has partnered with a number of companies, including Arrow Electronics, CloudGov Technologies, Cloudera and PSSC Labs, and according to Napolitano, the company has gained customers in an array of market segments, including financial services, education, federal agencies and service providers, both in the United States and globally.