Cisco Invests in Avi Networks Series D and Resells Avi’s Technology

Cisco has been working with Avi Networks, a company that provides application delivery controller services. Now, Cisco Investments has joined Avi Networks’ latest funding round. Avi today announced a $60 million Series D that includes DAG Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures. This brings Avi’s total funding to $115 million. Cisco is a new investor, and all of Avi’s existing investors participated in this oversubscribed round. Of its relationship with Cisco, Guru Chahal, vice president of product and co-founder of Avi Networks, said, “Our history goes back several years when Cisco launched its ACI data center products. Last year, that relationship went to the next level when Cisco saw so much joint interest that they elevated our partnership and put us on their price list.” Cisco resells the Avi Vantage Platform in markets around the world, and Avi closely integrates with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Cisco’s intent-based networking and automation technology for the data center. The Avi Vantage Platform delivers application services including a software load balancer, a web application firewall, and an elastic service mesh for container-based applications. “We are excited at the opportunity to invest in Avi Networks,” said Rob Salvagno, VP of corporate development at Cisco, in a statement. “We believe Avi Networks has built a disruptive platform for [Layer 4 to Layer 7] application services with a software-centric approach, enabling customers to scale network automation and application delivery across both private and public clouds.” Last year, Cisco said it was making it easier for customers that use its ACI in their private data centers to bridge that infrastructure to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.