US-based virtualised routing and switching vendor Arrcus wrapped up a $30 million funding round including first time participation from Nvidia, as it looks to accelerate growth across distributed networking.
Additional investors include Prosperity7 Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, General Catalyst, Liberty Global, Lightspeed and Clear Ventures. A representative from Arrcus told Mobile World Live (MWL) it has raised a total of $157 million since being founded in 2016.
It counts Softbank, Liberty Global, Saudi Arabia’s Aramco Digital and CoreSite among its more than 50 customers.
Arrcus is taking on industry heavyweights Cisco, Juniper Networks and Arista Networks in the routing and switching sector by employing a software-based approach using its ArcOS network operating system and ArcIQ analytics platform.
It provides software-defined products across 5G and the edge of networks as well as multi-cloud routing and switching for service providers, hyperscale companies and enterprises.
Arrcus stated its routing and switching platform, Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE), features a distributed microservices architecture that is flexible, high performance, scalable, fully programmable, modular and hybrid cloud ready.
Combined with Nvidia’s BlueField data processing units (DPU), Arrcus stated customers can efficiently offload, accelerate and isolate compute-intensive networking applications such as security and traffic engineering.
Benefits of partnership
AvidThink founder and principal Roy Chua told MWL having ArcOS support Nvidia’s BlueField DPUs for intra- and inter- data centre network fabric “increases the breadth of use cases that BlueField can accelerate”.
“Nvidia has been playing the smart game by employing available capital to expand their footprint in accelerating and enhancing computing, networking and security,” he explained.
He stated Arrcus’ relationship with Nvidia, in addition to the funding, allows it to collaborate on other data centre networking use cases including distributed training and distributed inference.
“Jointly, there’s also the telco and mobile networks relationship that Arrcus has, and that Nvidia has interest in,” Chua said.
He noted the relationship with Arrcus could help Nvidia expand its footprint “to reach into mobile networks and carriers, from the RAN, through transport, to telco data centres”.
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