Five-year-old Cumulus Networks has raised $35 million in a C round that includes Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Wing Venture Capital, and new investor Top Tier Capital, according to VentureBeat.
Cumulus Linux is an operating software for businesses to run their data center networks. The software can be run on bare metal switches, making it a threat to switch manufacturers such as Cisco. Cumulus also makes money by selling services and support.
Cumulus’s valuation has fallen below what it was two years ago for an earlier round, according to VentureBeat, citing CEO JR Rivers.
According to research by the Rayno Report, about two years ago the company was valued in the $300 million range.
Cumulus isn’t providing its current valuation. The company is referring reporters to CrunchBase, which doesn’t provide valuations either, but says Cumulus has raised $86 million in three rounds.
In a corporate blog earlier this week, Rivers said Cumulus gained 200 new customers in 2015, bringing its total customer base to 375.
“We saw a lot of classical use cases like 'application on bare-metal' and 'application on virtual machine' and experienced the rise of 'application in container' deployments,” wrote Rivers.
Cumulus has a partnership with Dell, where Dell resells Cumulus’s OS. However, this week Dell announced its Operating System 10 (OS10), which could ultimately compete with Cumulus Linux.