Netris Secures $15M Series A from a16z to Accelerate AI Neocloud Deployment

The surge in AI interest has prompted nearly everyone to enter the data center market. Yet, establishing a data center remains a complex challenge.

Beyond securing GPUs, network switches, and storage, you must configure everything to run smoothly and meet diverse customer demands. Preparing a data center for cloud computing, AI inference, and training services often takes months. The longer the launch is delayed, the higher the cost of idle, high-value GPUs.

Network automation startup Netris claims to eliminate this hurdle for neocloud providers. Their software runs directly on network switches, while their platform connects to these switches to help operators accelerate deployment by automating setup, configuration, and operations. The platform also offers network abstraction, allowing hardware configurations to be adjusted as needed, and isolates servers and resources at the hardware layer to support multi-tenancy for multiple customers.

If this sounds like a solution to a clear problem, you are correct. Until recently, data centers were dominated by large infrastructure operators like Equinix, NTT, Digital Realty, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, and Google. These companies addressed network setup, configuration, and multi-tenancy by hiring extensive engineering teams or building their own automation tools. Small neocloud businesses rarely possess such resources.

“As a GPU cluster operator, you need to make configuration changes to every link, every day. At traditional data centers, they were using something called SDN [software-defined networking] to do this, but SDN is falling short, because it’s a software technology,” Netris’ CEO Alex Saroyan told TechCrunch. “For AI, software is not okay, because the amount of traffic is so high, everything must be hardware accelerated. So you need something like SDN, but completely hardware accelerated. This is what we do, and this is what what we’ve been doing for eight years.”

An abstracted view of a data center’s topology. Image Credits: NetrisImage Credits:Netris /

Saroyan stated that Netris’ platform is vendor-agnostic, compatible with the networking equipment and standards used in data centers, supporting both Nvidia and AMD servers.

The startup’s promise has attracted significant support, including from Nvidia. Two years ago, the chipmaker was so impressed by a Netris demo that it recommended the company to several customers. Today, Netris operates across more than 35 GPU clusters globally (totaling about a million GPUs), serving clients like Lightning AI, Foxconn, Visionbay, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Tensorwave, Telus, and others.

To build on this momentum, Netris has now raised $15 million in a Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

Notably, AI is not involved in this process. Saroyan explained that the company uses algorithms developed previously for running and configuring automation and operations.

“We started way before AI. We understood the challenge early on, and we started developing this algorithm early on. AI is not deterministic, right? Sometimes it likes to do things on its own. It’s good for creative work, but for changing many thousands of switch configurations, you don’t need to be creative. You need to be very persistent and repeatable.”

a16z partner Guido Appenzeller is joining the company’s board. Looking forward, Netris plans to use the funding to hire more engineers and sales staff, add support for additional hardware vendors, and enhance functionality within its algorithm.