Up and coming switch silicon vendor Innovium today snapped up $170 million in its largest funding round to date. The latest round of financing includes contributions from a swarm of investors, the newest of which are Premji Invest, DFJ Growth, and BlackRock. Existing investors Grey Lock, Capricorn, WRVI, Qualcomm Ventures, Redline, S-Cubed Capital, and DAG also participated.

CEO Rajiv Khemani said Innovium's ability to secure such a large funding round despite the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 goes to show how strong demand is for the vendor's switching technologies.

Now valued at more than $1 billion "we have surpassed the unicorn status," he said in an interview with SDxCentral. The funding gives Innovium "a tremendous multi-year runway to execute on our company vision, expand our customer engagements, and become really a trusted partner to more customers."

According to Khemani, the late-stage funding will allow Innovium to develop new switching technologies and potentially branch out into adjacent networking technologies. "We as a company really want to provide breakthrough network silicon solutions and become a long-term partner for cloud and edge data center customers," he said.

Founded in 2014, Innovium has carved out a significant stake in a datacenter switching market long dominated by rival Broadcom. While Broadcom still commands approximately 76% of the market, according to research from the 650 Group, Innovium has, over the past six years, secured 23% of the market along with crucial partnerships with switch vendors like Cisco.

"For customers looking for silicon diversity, we are really the only credible option in the market at this point," Khemani said.

Today's announcement comes just months after Innovium unveiled its most ambitious switch silicon yet, the Teralynx 8, which is capable of 25.6 Tb/s of throughput.

“It is the fastest programable switch with the lowest latency,” boasted Amit Sanyal, VP of marketing at Innovium, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.

The chip is based on a single die, 7-nanometer process and is the company’s first to support up to 256 lanes of 112 Gb/s PAM4 serializer/deserializers.

These chips, which are set to reach original design manufacturers and original equipment manufactures beginning in the second half of 2020, are targeted at key growth areas for Innovium: The cloud. "Demand for bandwidth, I don't think is going down," Khemani said.