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Former Apple engineers raise $25M for networking startup SnapRoute
Despite facing a tremendous amount of competition from other software-defined networking providers, SnapRoute Inc. has had no trouble attracting investor interest.
As a matter of fact, Chief Executive Jason Forrester told Business Insider that seven different “Tier 1” venture firms approached his team in the run-up to the $25 million funding round it announced today. One of the prospective backers even tried asking his landlord to mediate a meeting. SnapRoute ended up choosing Norwest Venture Partners to lead today’s investment while accepting additional contributions from AT&T Inc., Microsoft Ventures and existing backer Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The startup will use the capital to try to expand the adoption of its FlexSwitch network operating system. Designed to run on commodity equipment, the platform implements lessons that Forrester and his team learned during their time with Apple Inc.’s data center operations group. One of the software’s main selling points is the fact that every organization can pick and choose exactly which capabilities to deploy.
SnapRoute’s goal is provide a more flexible alternative to proprietary switches, which usually come with a pre-configured feature set that covers every single potential use scenario. Doing away with unnecessary capabilities leaves fewer moving parts that hackers can try to exploit while making it easier for operations personnel to carry out maintenance. This minimalist approach is particularly useful when it comes to updates, which take less effort to perform than on more traditional systems since there are fewer lines of code to refresh.
The FlexSwitch components that an organization decides to keep can in turn be customized extensively using a set of native programming interfaces. Network personnel have a choice between managing their deployments using a command-line interface, more advanced automation tools such as Chef and Puppet. SnapRoute claims that its platform enables organizations to control everything down to the processors powering their switches.
The startup said that today’s funding will be used to develop additional features for FlexSwitch and step up customer acquisition efforts. SnapRoute has raised a total of $29.5 million to date.
Image via Pixabay
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