Case study
How Netris announced its $15M Series A from a16z
Eight years building the network layer for AI infrastructure, one announcement to say it landed. We made the film that carried Netris's Series A, with a16z's partners on camera beside the founder.
- Series A, led by a16z
- $15M
- Reactions on LinkedIn
- 502
- Comments on LinkedIn
- 142
Netris × EPTA
Netris automates the hardest part of any cloud: the network. Its software runs on the switches themselves and handles the setup, configuration and multi-tenancy that GPU clusters need, across Ethernet, InfiniBand and every fabric in between.
Alex Saroyan, Tigran Martirosyan and Arsen Arakelyan founded it in 2018. It is now live in more than 35 AI clusters, about a million GPUs, for customers including Lightning AI, Foxconn and TensorWave, and grew its ARR 800% in the twelve months before the raise.
The brief
In June Netris raised a $15 million Series A led by a16z, with Guido Appenzeller joining the board. After eight years of building something most of the industry did not believe in at first, the announcement had to land with the people buying AI infrastructure.
Network automation is invisible when it works, which makes it hard to put on screen. And a funding story has a short shelf life: it gets told well on the day or not at all.
The film
The film puts Alex beside the a16z partners who backed him: Martin Casado, Guido Appenzeller and Raghu Raghuram, the people behind Nicira, VMware NSX and Big Switch, who built the networking layer of the modern data center.
When the people who defined data center networking say Netris is doing the same for AI, the raise stops being a headline and becomes an argument.
The launch
Alex posted the film on 25 June, the day TechCrunch covered the round. On LinkedIn, where AI infrastructure buyers read, it drew 502 reactions and 142 comments.
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