Avi Networks

Avi Networks was founded in 2012 in Santa Clara, California, by four former Cisco Systems engineers -- Murali Basavaiah, Ranga Rajagopalan, Umesh Mahajan, and Guru Chahal -- who had spent years together building data-center networking and storage solutions at Cisco before setting out to rethink application delivery for the cloud era. The company operated in stealth for roughly two years while building its core technology: a software-only application delivery controller (ADC) architecture that separated a centralized control plane (the Avi Controller) from a distributed, elastic data plane made up of 'Avi Service Engines' -- a design explicitly built to mirror the elasticity and self-service principles of public cloud infrastructure, in contrast to legacy hardware ADC appliances from incumbents like F5 and Citrix.

Avi Networks emerged from stealth in December 2014, disclosing $33 million in combined early funding (a ~$12.2 million initial round led by Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, followed by a ~$20.8 million round led by Menlo Ventures with Greylock and Lightspeed continuing to participate). The company went on to raise additional rounds -- including a round that added DAG Ventures as an investor, and a later ~$60 million round that brought in Cisco Systems (Avi's founders' former employer) as a strategic investor -- for total disclosed venture funding of approximately $115 million. Greylock Partners, represented by partner Asheem Chandna, was Avi's first institutional backer and is listed by Greylock as having 'first partnered' with the company at its Series A. In December 2018, Avi Networks brought on industry veteran Mark Anderson (former President of Palo Alto Networks) as Executive Chairman, alongside CEO Amit Pandey, who had joined to lead the company and previously served as CEO of enterprise software startups Zenprise and Terracotta.

Over its life as an independent company, Avi's Vantage Platform grew into a full application-services suite -- combining local and global server load balancing, an intelligent web application firewall (iWAF), application acceleration, real-time analytics and closed-loop telemetry, and (later) a universal service mesh -- deployable across bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containers, and integrated with VMware NSX/vCenter, OpenStack, AWS, Google Cloud, Red Hat OpenShift/Ansible, and container orchestrators including Kubernetes, Docker, and Mesos. By 2019, the platform was deployed at hundreds of global enterprises, with publicly named customers including Deutsche Bank, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks.

Business model

B2B enterprise software sold to large organizations for data-center and multi-cloud application delivery, licensed as software (no proprietary hardware appliances required)

Enterprise software licensing/subscription for the Avi Vantage Platform (Avi Controller + distributed Avi Service Engines), sold directly and through channel/technology partners including VMware (NSX, vCenter integration)