DriveNets has secured $410 million in Series D financing as demand accelerates for Ethernet-based networking fabrics in large-scale AI deployments. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Atreides Management, brings the company’s total funding to $1 billion. New investors include AMD and Red Dot Capital, while existing investors Pitango and D1 Capital Partners also participated. The company said it has more than $1 billion in secured business and has operated cash-flow positive since 2025.
Founded in 2015, DriveNets built its reputation supplying disaggregated networking software and infrastructure to major telecommunications operators, including AT&T and Comcast. The company is now applying the same architecture to AI networking, targeting hyperscalers, foundation model developers, NeoCloud providers, and large enterprises. DriveNets said the new capital will primarily fund inventory expansion to support a growing pipeline for AI fabric deployments and accelerate development of its heterogeneous AI infrastructure strategy.
DriveNets positions Ethernet as the foundation for multi-vendor AI clusters that combine accelerators from different suppliers. The company works with AMD, Broadcom, Dell, Supermicro, and other ecosystem partners to optimize networking across collective communication libraries, transport protocols, NICs, switches, and orchestration layers. DriveNets argues that network bottlenecks and lengthy cluster bring-up cycles remain major obstacles to AI infrastructure efficiency, particularly as organizations move toward heterogeneous architectures that mix accelerators from multiple vendors for training and inference workloads.
- Series D financing totaled $410 million, bringing total capital raised to $1 billion.
- Funding was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Atreides Management.
- New investors include AMD and Red Dot Capital.
- DriveNets reports more than $1 billion in secured business and positive cash flow since 2025.
- The company plans to expand inventory and support growing demand for AI fabric deployments.
- DriveNets’ AI Fabric is based on Ethernet and supports scale-up, scale-out, scale-across, storage, and front-end networking architectures.
- The company is collaborating with AMD on validated reference architectures designed to improve GPU utilization and reduce cost-per-token.
- Broadcom and DriveNets are jointly promoting Ethernet-based AI infrastructure as an alternative to proprietary networking approaches.
- DriveNets serves major telecom operators and is expanding into hyperscaler, foundation model, and enterprise AI deployments.
“The most expensive idle asset in the world right now is a GPU waiting on the network,” said Ido Susan, CEO and Co-Founder of DriveNets. “We’re applying a decade of high-performance networking expertise to enable our customers to achieve higher utilization, reduce cost per workload, and scale their AI operations efficiently — on any AI accelerator they choose.”
🌐 Analysis: The financing underscores growing investor confidence that networking will become a critical control point in AI infrastructure economics. As AI clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of accelerators, networking performance, reliability, and deployment speed increasingly influence overall GPU utilization and cost-per-token. DriveNets is attempting to extend its telecom-scale networking expertise into the AI data center market, where Ethernet-based fabrics are gaining momentum.
🌐 Analysis: The round also highlights an emerging industry trend toward heterogeneous AI architectures. AMD, Broadcom, Dell, Supermicro, and other ecosystem participants are promoting open Ethernet-based networking as an alternative to vertically integrated AI stacks. DriveNets’ strategy aligns with broader efforts across the industry to enable clusters that combine accelerators, networking, and software from multiple suppliers while maintaining high performance and operational efficiency.
