Hedgehog

Hedgehog is a networking software company whose main product is the Hedgehog Open Network Fabric, an open networking platform built on the SONiC network operating system that provides connectivity, tooling and automation for deploying cloud infrastructure on commodity switches without vendor lock-in. The fabric is organized around VPCs (Virtual Private Clouds) modeled on public-cloud offerings and exposes a multi-tenant API in which users declare intent for network isolation and connectivity; that intent is automatically translated into configuration for switches and software appliances. The platform is built on Kubernetes, so all user-facing APIs are Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions and standard Kubernetes tooling can manage fabric resources.

The company positions the platform for AI infrastructure, describing capabilities including intent-based configuration in place of manual device configuration, multi-tenant isolation within the fabric, deployment of new clusters in hours rather than months, cluster partitioning for utilization, intelligent agents and gateways for scale-up and scale-out topologies, and multi-tenancy and peering features intended to let operators package and sell AI capacity. Hedgehog states it is vendor-agnostic across hardware and network operating systems, aligning with Open Compute Project standards and championing SONiC, and has extended the same architecture to support NVIDIA reference designs including Cumulus Linux and Spectrum-X. Supporting offerings include a downloadable virtual lab that runs the fabric on a virtual machine without physical network hardware, an AI Network Planner, OCP reference architectures, and a secure-multitenancy whitepaper.

Code is developed in public under the githedgehog GitHub organization, which hosts 55 repositories, including the fabric control plane (Go), a fabricator installer (Go), a dataplane written in Rust, and documentation, published under the Apache-2.0 license."]

Founding story

Hedgehog emerged from stealth in October 2022 as a Seattle startup founded to make the SONiC open-source network operating system — originally developed by Microsoft for its Azure data centers and open-sourced in 2016 — usable by enterprises, with an explicitly stated ambition to be the "Red Hat for SONiC." It was co-founded by CEO Marc Austin, a repeat founder who previously spent four years at Cisco, helped run the Seattle firm IoT Capital and was a director at Amazon from 2010 to 2012 on the Kindle Enterprise team; Mike Dvorkin, a networking specialist involved in launching Insieme Networks; and Josh Saul, previously a marketing leader at Apstra and Netris.

Business model

Hedgehog develops the Open Network Fabric as an open-source project (Apache-2.0 licensed repositories) and sells commercial subscriptions and services around it. Subscription terms are contracted through Order Forms with Hedgehog SONiC Foundation, Inc. and cover subscriptions, professional services, training services and access to Hedgehog online properties; clients that do not accept the subscription terms may still use Hedgehog products without support from the company.

Subscription fees are billed in US dollars against Order Forms, priced by counting "Units" associated with a product — for example the number of systems or nodes deployed — with automatic renewal for successive terms equal to the original services term unless either party gives 30 days' notice. Invoices are payable within 30 days by credit card, ACH or wire, fees are non-refundable, and clients must report and pay for any deployed units exceeding those previously procured. Professional services and training services are also offered.

Traction

As of the 2022 stealth exit the company had no paying customers and was engaged with design partners. Public repositories show modest community scale: the fabric repository had 32 stars and 9 forks, the dataplane 19 stars and 9 forks, and the fabricator 9 stars and 6 forks, across 55 repositories in the organization. A customer profile video features Zipline, and the OCP AI networking blueprint launch and release 26.03 indicate continued product delivery.

Latest developments

Hedgehog released version 26.03 in August 2026, described as advancing an AI-ready network fabric that behaves like cloud. The company launched an OCP AI networking blueprint reference architecture, published a secure multitenancy whitepaper and an AI Network Planner, and extended platform support to NVIDIA reference designs including Cumulus Linux and Spectrum-X. Recent technical publications cover disaggregated inference and RoCE fabric design.