Netris has secured $15 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz to help new cloud operators launch data centres faster.
Building a data centre is difficult work. Securing the right GPUs and network switches is only the first hurdle. Operators must then configure every device, ensure systems are running, and meet specific customer requirements. Preparing a facility for AI inference and training can take months. Every month of delay means expensive hardware sits idle.
The bottleneck for new cloud operators
Network automation startup Netris claims to solve this for neoclouds. Its software runs on network switches and connects to them to automate setup, configuration, and operations. The platform abstracts the network so hardware can change as needed. It also isolates servers at the hardware layer to allow multiple customers to share resources.
This addresses a clear gap in the market. Large infrastructure operators like Equinix, NTT, Digital Realty, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, and Google largely solved network setup and multi-tenancy by hiring large engineering teams or building their own automation. Smaller neocloud businesses rarely have those resources.
“As a GPU cluster operator, you need to make configuration changes to every link, every day,” Netris CEO Alex Saroyan told TechCrunch. “At traditional data centers, they were using something called SDN to do this, but SDN is falling short, because it’s a software technology. 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 we’ve been doing for eight years.”
Saroyan noted that the platform is vendor-agnostic and compatible with networking equipment used at data centres for both Nvidia and AMD servers.
Backing from Nvidia and growing adoption
Nvidia has become a believer in the technology. Two years ago, the chipmaker was so impressed by a demo of Netris technology that it recommended the company to several customers. Now, Netris operates at more than 35 GPU clusters globally, representing about one million GPUs in total. Clients include Lightning AI, Foxconn, Visionbay, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Tensorwave, and Telus.
The funding from Andreessen Horowitz aims to build on this momentum. Netris plans to hire more engineers and sales staff, add support for additional hardware vendors, and expand functionality within its algorithm.
Guido Appenzeller, a partner at a16z, is joining the company’s board.
There is no artificial intelligence involved in the solution itself. Saroyan explained that the company uses algorithms developed previously for automation and operations.
“We started way before AI. We understood the challenge early on, and we started developing this algorithm early on,” Saroyan said. “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.”
What it means
The funding allows Netris to scale its operations without relying on general-purpose AI models for critical infrastructure tasks. The focus remains on deterministic algorithms that execute repetitive configuration changes reliably.
