DriveNets Secures $410M Series D to Meet Surging Demand for Ethernet Fabric in Large-Scale AI Deployments

Insider Brief

  • DriveNets has closed a $410 million Series D funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Atreides Management, bringing its total capital raised to $1 billion, with new investors AMD and Red Dot Capital joining existing backers Pitango and D1 Capital Partners.
  • The company will use the funds to scale inventory and expand its AI fabric solutions, which are designed to eliminate network bottlenecks in large GPU clusters by optimizing the full networking stack — reducing cost-per-token and improving GPU utilization across multi-vendor environments.
  • DriveNets is positioning itself as a foundational player in what it calls Heterogeneous AI infrastructure, where multiple accelerators from different vendors operate within the same cluster, a shift the company believes will define the next era of AI data centers as the market moves from single-vendor stacks toward open, Ethernet-based architectures.

PRESS RELEASE — DriveNets, a leader in large-scale networking solutions, has announced it has completed a $410 million Series D financing round, reaching $1 billion total capital raised. With more than $1B in secured business and having been cash-flow positive since 2025, the company will use the additional funding to scale inventory to support its growing AI fabric pipeline and expand its Heterogeneous AI infrastructure solutions. The funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Atreides Management. New investors, AMD and Red Dot Capital, joined alongside existing investors Pitango and D1 Capital Partners.

Since the company’s founding ten years ago, DriveNets’ Network Cloud has become the network of record for the world’s largest telecommunications companies. Built on the same engineering foundation, DriveNets’ Ethernet-based AI fabric supports large-scale AI infrastructures built by foundation labs, hyperscalers, NeoClouds, and large enterprises. The company is now working with leading AI vendors such as AMD, Broadcom, and others to tighten the integration between networking and compute in multi-vendor AI environments, maximizing cluster performance and GPU utilization to substantially improve token economics. It is also partnering with Dell, Supermicro, and other systems partners on go-to-market activities.

“This financing round marks a pivotal step in scaling our company to meet the surging demand for large-scale AI infrastructure,” said Ido Susan, CEO and Co-Founder of DriveNets. “The most expensive idle asset in the world right now is a GPU waiting on the network. 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.”

“AI infrastructure is entering a new era of open, integrated systems where compute, networking, and software scale together,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AI at AMD. “Our support of DriveNets’ Series D reflects a shared commitment to scaling AI workloads efficiently with AMD Instinct accelerators and DriveNets’ high-performance fabric on open infrastructure, advancing open, standards-based AI data centers.”

Addressing the most expensive idle asset problem — a GPU waiting on the network

DriveNets’ AI fabric solutions are based on standard Ethernet and support scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across architectures, along with front-end and storage connectivity for large-scale AI clusters. They address two fundamental constraints in AI infrastructures today: large GPU clusters operating below peak efficiency due to network bottlenecks and reliability challenges, and slow cluster bring-up time (‘idle Capex’), especially in multi-vendor environments.

DriveNets’ high-performance AI Fabric eliminates networking bottlenecks by performing end-to-end networking optimizations across the entire AI stack, including collective communication libraries, transport protocols, NICs, the network fabric, and system-level orchestration. Some of these optimizations are developed in collaboration with leading AI accelerator vendors, such as the recently published validated reference architecture for AMD-DriveNets-based clusters that maximizes GPU utilization, reduces cost-per-token, and enables rapid deployment and efficient end-to-end scaling.

“As AI systems reach unprecedented scale, the performance of the underlying network fabric has become a primary driver of AI economics,” said Charlie Kawwas, President, Semiconductor Solutions Group, Broadcom. “Broadcom’s AI semiconductor and Ethernet switching solutions, combined with DriveNets’ high-performance fabric, deliver the scale and efficiency that modern AI workloads demand. This collaboration reflects how open Ethernet is becoming the foundation of the next-generation AI data center.”

“AI networking is on track to surpass $200 billion by the end of the decade, driven by the shift from single-vendor stacks to multi-vendor and later heterogeneous AI infrastructures. DriveNets enters this phase with a strong combination — tier-one service provider reliability, validated AMD reference design, and the inventory position to deliver into a supply-constrained market. That positions the company well as open Ethernet becomes the foundation of next-generation AI infrastructure,” said Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst, 650 Group.

DriveNets — a foundational player in Heterogeneous AI

The recent AI infrastructure spending shift from training to inference is expected to drive the adoption of Heterogeneous AI architectures that bring infrastructure costs down and optimize power utilization.

Heterogeneous AI architecture uses multiple AI accelerators from multiple vendors within the same cluster, each best for a different stage or task within the AI training or inference process. The compute resources in the cluster are orchestrated to provide the best overall performance and power utilization, to reduce cost per million tokens and maximize tokens per watt.

DriveNets’ AI fabric is uniquely positioned to support Heterogeneous multi-vendor AI environments due to its ability to perform full-stack optimization for any AI accelerator in the cluster, maximizing the performance and utilization of the entire cluster.

“Every shift in compute produces a new networking giant. Cisco wired the internet. Arista wired the cloud. NVIDIA wired single-vendor AI. DriveNets is wiring what comes next: Heterogeneous AI,” said Adam Fisher, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners. “This is why BVP led DriveNets’ $410M Series D, an existing portfolio company we’ve backed since its Series A.”

About DriveNets

DriveNets is a leader in large-scale networking solutions for AI infrastructure and service providers. The company’s disaggregated networking architecture transforms the economics of large-scale infrastructures while maximizing performance, utilization, and operational efficiency. Its high-performance AI fabric maximizes GPU utilization and accelerates deployments by optimizing the AI stack end-to-end, resulting in higher tokens-per-second and lower cost-per-token. DriveNets’ solutions power production networks for global tier-1 operators like AT&T and Comcast, and scale multi-vendor AI infrastructures at foundation model labs, NeoClouds, and enterprises. Learn more at https://www.drivenets.com

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