Former Cisco networking EVP and Juniper engineering leader Jonathan Davidson has joined the board of directors at startup vendor Aria Networks.

Davidson is a networking stalwart, working his way up at Cisco from a technical assistance center engineer to leading its networking business and even serving as advisor to CEO Chuck Robbins for a period.

Sandwiched between his time at Cisco was almost a decade at Juniper Networks, where he managed the firm’s data center, carrier, security, and enterprise connectivity portfolio.

After departing Cisco in 2025, Davidson has turned his hand to the world of startups, advising emerging players like edge computing orchestration firm Zededa.

At Aria, he’ll serve as an independent board member for a company looking to shake up the networking status quo. Aria is led by Mansour Karam, the Apstra founder who also found his way to Juniper following a $190 million acquisition. It’s developing a portfolio of offerings directly targeting AI networking, arguing that traditional product lines aren’t suited for the demands of growing workloads.

“AI factories are the largest buildout of compute in history, and connectivity has become the bottleneck,” Davidson said in a statement. “Every point of GPU utilization and every token per second maps directly to revenue, and the network determines a lot of that.

“Most of the industry is still treating AI networking as faster versions of what came before. Aria has the chance to define a new category, where the network is designed, instrumented, and operated end to end for AI, and token efficiency is the metric that matters. It is a company I wanted to help build.”

Alongside a switch line built atop Broadcom silicon, Davidson joins a startup developing a dedicated software stack for AI networking, including its operating system AriaOS and end-to-end telemetry monitoring.

To fuel its AI networking efforts, Aria has secured backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, and the Gavin Baker-led Atreides Management in a $125 million funding round earlier this year.

“[Davidson] has led the engineering teams behind nearly every major network operating system that runs today’s enterprises, service providers, and hyperscalers. His experience scaling networking businesses, engineering organizations, and customer relationships will be invaluable as we build the network AI factories need,” Karam added.