Fresh off its $14 million cash infusion, startup Embrane has hired a new president and CEO: Bill Burns, formerly CEO of test vendor Spirent.

Burns, whose arrival was announced Monday afternoon, replaces founding CEO Dante Malagrinò, who will now be chief product officer.

Prepared statements from Burns and Malagrinò read like the typical “next level” pronouncements, where it’s time for a startup’s founding team to recruit a more experienced executive to expand the business and seal new partnerships.

Burns became Spirent’s CEO in 2008. He left last September, probably prodded by the fact that revenues “reached a five-year low in the first half of 2013,” as FT phrased it.

Embrane, a software-defined networking (SDN) whose heleos product chains together Layer 4-7 elements to apply to services, reportedly had been struggling but just raised $14 million, some of it from Cisco, to keep the fires burning. Separately, Embrane struck partnerships with Cisco and Sourcefire — which has since been acquired by Cisco.