via TechCrunch AI
Netris Raises $15M Series A from a16z to Accelerate AI Neocloud Deployments
The AI boom has spurred a wave of new data center businesses, but launching a data center is far from trivial.
Even after securing GPUs, network switches, and storage, operators face the challenge of configuring, running, and tailoring infrastructure to diverse customer needs. Preparing a data center for AI inference and training can take months — and every idle GPU adds to the cost of delayed market entry.
Network automation startup Netris claims to eliminate this bottleneck for neoclouds. The company offers software that runs on network switches, paired with a platform that automates setup, configuration, and operations. By providing network abstraction, it enables flexible hardware reconfiguration and hardware-layer isolation for multi-tenancy, allowing neoclouds to serve multiple customers securely.
Until recently, data centers were the domain of giants like Equinix, NTT, Digital Realty, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, and Google. These incumbents solved network setup, configuration, and multi-tenancy through large engineering teams and custom automation. Smaller neocloud businesses rarely have such resources.
“As a GPU cluster operator, you need to make configuration changes to every link, every day. Traditional data centers used SDN [software-defined networking], but SDN falls short for AI because traffic volumes are so high that everything must be hardware accelerated,” said Netris CEO Alex Saroyan. “You need something like SDN, but completely hardware accelerated. That’s what we do, and have been doing for eight years.”
Netris’ approach directly addresses the scale and performance demands of modern AI workloads. The $15 million Series A round, led by a16z, signals strong investor confidence in the company’s vision to help neoclouds go live faster — and more cost-effectively — in an era of compute shortages and skyrocketing demand for AI infrastructure.