Netris raises $15M Series A from a16z to help AI neoclouds go live faster

Netris provides software that runs on network switches, and offers a platform that helps neocloud operators reduce the time it takes to go live.

Even if you solve the problem of securing the GPUs, network switches, and storage, you still have to get everything configured, running, and be able to cater to customers’ various needs. Getting a data center ready to provide cloud-computing services, specifically for AI inference and training, can take months of work. And the longer you take to get to market, the higher the cost of having all those precious GPUs sitting idle. Network automation startup Netris claims it can make that problem disappear for neoclouds. The company provides software that runs on network switches, and it also offers a platform that connects to switches to help neocloud operators reduce the time it takes to go live by automating setup, configuration, and operations. The platform also provides network abstraction, so hardware configurations can be changed as required, and it isolates servers and resources at the hardware layer so neoclouds can serve multiple customers (multi-tenancy). If that sounds like a solution to an obvious problem, you’re not wrong. Until recently, data centers were largely the domain of large infrastructure operators like Equinix, NTT, Digital Realty, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, or Google. Those companies pretty much solved network setup, configuration, and multi-tenancy for themselves by hiring ranks of engineers or building the automation themselves. Small neocloud businesses rarely have such resources at their disposal. “As a GPU cluster operator, you need to make configuration changes to every link, every day. At traditional data centers, they were using something called SDN [software-defined networking] to do this, but SDN is falling short, because it’s a software technology,” Netris’ CEO Alex Saroyan told TechCrunch. “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 said Netris’ platform is vendor-agnostic, compatible with networking equipment and standards used at data centers, both for Nvidia and AMD’s servers.