Telecommunication Software Developer DriveNets Raises $110 Million

Israeli networking software startup Drivenets Ltd. emerged from stealth mode on Thursday, announcing it received $110 million in financing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Pitango Growth, and several private investors.

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DriveNets develops network management tools for communications service providers (CSPs). The company was founded in late 2015 by entrepreneurs Ido Susan, who previously co-founded Intucell, acquired by Cisco in 2013 for $475 million, and Hillel Kobrinsky, who founded Interwise, bought by AT&T for $121 million in 2007. Drivenets employs a team of 150 people and plans to hire 50 more by the end of the year.

 

In an interview with Calcalist this week, Susan said that DriveNets, which was self-funded until now, was profitable, and that the funding round is meant to help the company grow substantially. “We leave a lot of money and a lot of deals on the table because we don’t have enough human resources to address demand,” he said.

Susan said he believes the company solved the biggest challenge facing CSPs today, which see data demands double each year and find it difficult to monetize growth. “In a market dominated by Cisco, Juniper Networks, Inc., and Huawei, we adopted the model of Amazon and Google, which we applied to CSPs, which means switching mountains of hardware for simple routers with our software,” Susan said.