Highlights:

  • With the money from this round, NetBox Labs will be able to scale the creation of NetBox and NetBox Cloud, two open-source products.
  • The platform has gained over 12,000 stars on GitHub, thousands of enterprise installations, and hundreds of technology integrations, proving to be a huge success.

NetBox Labs Inc., a network management and automation startup, aims to take off after closing a USD 20 million round of funding recently.

Raj Dutt, the CEO of Grafana Labs Inc., Mango Capital, IBM Corp., Two Sigma Ventures, the Founder Collective, and Entrée Capital all contributed to the Series A round, which Flybridge Capital organized.

The open-source NetBox platform, developed by NetBox Labs, is intended for infrastructure resource management and modern network automation. It provides feature-rich and API functionality for managing IP addresses, data center infrastructure, and other networking tasks. The more than seven-year-old project provides the building blocks for automated testing, monitor updates, drive device provisioning, and more while assisting businesses in reducing their reliance on jumbled spreadsheets.

The platform has gained over 12,000 stars on GitHub, thousands of enterprise installations, and hundreds of technology integrations, proving to be a huge success. Numerous users and businesses, including Dartmouth College and Chewy Inc., use it as a “network source of truth” to power automation.

NS1 Inc., a networking company that IBM recently acquired, was spun off into NetBox Labs, which recently debuted as a standalone business. Kris Beever, the past CEO of NS1, has taken over the same position at NetBox Labs, that he had co-founded with Jeremy Stretch, the chief maintainer. In order to reduce the administrative burden of hosting and managing NetBox instances, it has developed the NetBox Cloud platform, a managed version of NetBox. It also boasts additional compliance, dependability, and security features.

Stretch said, “NetBox has become a linchpin technology enabling organizations to accelerate their automation journeys and take back control of their networks.”

Beevers added, “NetBox is unequivocally the dominant network source of truth on the market today, and we are committed to making sure it’s the first choice for every networking professional on the planet, whether they are an open source or commercial user.”

It’s encouraging to see NetBox Labs attracting funding, according to Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc., as networking continues to be one of the areas with the highest business costs. “With layers and layers of networking technologies and infrastructure baked over each other, the cleanup is risky and offers little reward. New solutions that can reduce complexity, lower the cost of operations and reduce the operational management burden are key, and it’s no surprise that the innovation here is coming from startups.” He said.

With the money from this round, NetBox Labs will be able to scale the creation of NetBox and NetBox Cloud, two of its open-source products.

A company whose technology has such wide adoption even before it has raised Series A funding, according to David Aronoff, general partner of Flybridge Capital, presents a rare opportunity. He said, “NetBox Labs is such a company. We believe its role as a network source of truth is critical to the future of network automation and will fundamentally change the industry.”