Lumina Networks, an open source networking company that was spun off from Brocade last summer, said it closed a $10 million Series A financing round, including $8 million in new funding.
Verizon Ventures led the round, with AT&T and Rahi Systems among the other new investors participating.
Lumina Networks said it will use the cash injection to develop new products focused on its SDN Controller, which is powered by OpenDaylight, and for business expansion in Europe and Japan.
Lumina is focused on the open source, software-defined networking sector that aims to take a hardware agnostic approach to virtualizing networks.
“This investment by both Verizon and AT&T demonstrates the strategic importance of open source networking to the automation and digitization of their networks,” said Andrew Coward, founder and CEO of Lumina Networks, in a statement. “We understand the value of our mission to take open source networking out of the labs of our customers and into production deployment. This funding will enable us to reach a wider customer base and realize the industry vision of easily deployable open source software-defined networking.”
The company said the financing follows strong network operator deployments of its product during the first nine months of operations, with revenues more than double their pre-August 2017 spin-off levels.
“SDN has emerged as a key architectural model in delivering the promised goals of next generation wireless networks such as 5G by enabling high speeds and low latency at lower cost points,” said Alexander Khalin, director at Verizon Ventures.
“Open source is instrumental to Verizon’s digital transformation,” Khalin added.
“SDN is at the heart of our network transformation, and we’ve committed to virtualizing and software-controlling 75% of our core network functions by 2020,” said Chris Rice, SVP of AT&T Labs, Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design.