DriveNets raised $208 million in a Series B funding round that pushes its valuation above $1 billion, the Israeli startup announced today. 

The funding, which catapults DriveNets to “unicorn” status, comes just four months after its largest customer deployment to date with AT&T. It’s pursuing similar deals with operators and cloud providers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

DriveNets Network Cloud serves as the core routing system for AT&T, which commercially deployed the network operating system software in its network last year. DriveNets CEO Ido Susan at the time said all of AT&T’s growth and legacy traffic will be running on the technology by late 2022. 

Susan tells SDxCentral that DriveNets is currently involved in commercial deployments, testing, and trials with “more than 36 cloud providers and network operators globally.” The new funding will partially be used for additional hires in sales, operations, and support in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, he added.

“The process of installing DriveNets Network Cloud is straightforward and simple,” he wrote in response to questions, adding that the company managed to install multiple network clouds amid the COVID-19 crisis. That effort involved just “a couple of support engineers” that filled their pickup truck with white-box hardware, drove to a customer site, installed within a few hours, and returned home the same day, Susan explained. 

“No forklifts, no planes, no special crew,” he said. “The deployment is flexible and easily adjusted” with fully automated provisioning. 

There’s also a relatively low threshold of technical requirements that an operator must achieve before DriveNets can be deployed, according to Susan. Customers must purchase the necessary white-box hardware, but the provisioning of that equipment and the DriveNets Network Cloud software is automated on the company’s network orchestrator.

“Our value-added resellers and system integrator partners found that the installation of DriveNets Network Cloud is faster than a traditional chassis-based router due to the automation and greater visibility from component to software container,” Susan wrote.

DriveNets claims its model reduces time to deployment over traditional chassis-based routers by 15%. In addition to its faster deployment process and lower costs, Susan previously explained that DriveNets is motivated by factors that aren’t shared by traditional routing vendors like Juniper and Cisco.

“Juniper and Cisco’s motivation is to sell maximum boxes. They get revenue per hardware or per box that they are selling you,” he told SDxCentral in September 2020. “Our motivation is the opposite. We want to sell minimum boxes, meaning to increase the utilization of the network to maximum, and sell you more and more software.”

It’s a model that has support in high places, including AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch who described DriveNets as a “disruptive supplier” that played a central role in the operator’s deployment of a disaggregated core routing software platform. AT&T paired DriveNets software with a white-box router it submitted to the Open Compute Project (OCP) based on Broadcom’s Jericho2 system-on-a-chip (SoC), and the corresponding architecture can “gracefully scale from 4 Tb/s to 192 Tb/s, Fuetsch said last fall. 

“We find that some of our competitors suggest that our model is more difficult to operate and support due to the open, multi-vendor approach,” Susan said. “This claim would be similar to saying that clouds are more operationally complex than the old data centers. Both are obviously not the case.”

DriveNets’ funding round was led by D1 Capital Partners, with additional participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Pitango, and new investor Atreides Management.