NetBox Labs – an open-source startup transforming network management and automation – announced it has raised $20 million in Series A funding. Flybridge Capital led the investment with participation from GGV Capital, Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, IBM, the Founder Collective, and Entrée Capital. And as part of the round, David Aronoff of Flybridge, Raj Dutt of Grafana Labs, and Glenn Solomon of GGV Capital will join the board.
The Series A funding round comes on the heels of the company’s spin-out from NS1, which was recently acquired by IBM. And Kris Beevers, former CEO of NS1, is leading NetBox Labs as co-founder and CEO with NetBox Lead Maintainer Jeremy Stretch also serving as a co-founder. Former NS1 executives in finance, operations, technology, product, and business development along with more than a dozen dedicated team members, round out the NetBox Labs staff. The company is going to be headquartered in New York City with a global, remote workforce.
NetBox was developed and proven over the past 7 years to be a critical tool at the center of the networking strategies of every type of enterprise, ranging from Fortune 500 and major telcos to mid-market enterprises and tech companies. And with 12,000 stars on GitHub, NetBox has tens of thousands of enterprise installs and hundreds of vendor and technology integrations. Plus it combines the capabilities of IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM). NetBox eliminates messy spreadsheets and serves as the foundation to drive device provisioning, automated testing, monitoring updates, etc.
The Series A funding round will enable NetBox Labs to scale development and delivery of open source NetBox and NetBox Cloud, a hosted NetBox solution with specific performance and service level agreements and commercial support. And dozens of customers, including Chewy, Dartmouth College, and Constant Contact, already rely on NetBox Cloud as a network source of truth to drive their network automation strategy. With intro, standard, and enterprise plans available, NetBox Cloud eliminates the administrative overhead associated with hosting and managing enterprise-grade NetBox instances while adding features for reliability, security, compliance, etc.
KEY QUOTES:
“Once in a decade you have the opportunity to support an organization and leadership team that has proven its ability to win previously and whose technology has widespread customer adoption before even raising Series A funding. NetBox Labs is such a company. We believe NetBox’s role as a network source of truth is critical to the future of network automation and will fundamentally change the industry.”
— David Aronoff, general partner at Flybridge
“After piloting NetBox and seeing an 80% reduction in tickets related to manual errors on our network, we quickly made the move to NetBox Cloud and haven’t looked back. Using NetBox Cloud has created a culture shift within our IT organization that has had profound results on our ability to automate our network and better serve the many stakeholders in our community.”
— Felix Windt, CTO at Dartmouth College
“With the increasingly dynamic, distributed, and critical nature of networks, combined with the explosion of devices and the rapid transition of every enterprise to SaaS and connected systems, networking teams are feeling the crunch. In this reality, network automation is a critical priority,” said Stretch. “NetBox has become a linchpin technology enabling organizations to accelerate their automation journeys and take back control of their networks.”
NetBox Lead Maintainer and co-founder Jeremy Stretch
“NetBox is unequivocally the dominant network source of truth on the market today, and we are committed to making sure it’s the first choice for every networking professional on the planet, whether they are an open source or commercial user,” said Beevers. “NetBox Labs is backed by some of the most successful and experienced visionaries and investors in open source businesses – including early investors in MongoDB and HashiCorp. With this DNA in our team and board, we will accelerate the open source transformation of the networking industry, starting with NetBox.”
— Kris Beevers, CEO and co-founder of NetfBox Labs
