Pluribus announced today that it has landed a substantial Series D funding round of $50M led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek and including Ericsson as a strategic investor.

Make no doubt about it, this money is a war chest to take on Cisco and VMware for the reign of Software Defined Networking (SDN) supremacy. The impressive roster of investors includes prior venture investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow, and AME Cloud Ventures. Newtech, an Asia data-center infrastructure provider, also joined as a strategic investor. This event puts Pluribus in the top tier of SDN startups.

It's safe to say that Pluribus is now rivaling Cumulus Networks, which makes a flavor of the Linux Operating System (OS) for networking, for that #1 spot as the hottest SDN startup. The Pluribus investment was an "up round," according to Pluribus officials, meaning it got a higher valuation than the prior round. I would expect this vaults Pluribus into a valuation range of $300M or more.

I have written some more detailed analysis about this event, including some thoughts from Pluribus CEO Kumar Srikantan, on SDxCentral.