Silicon Valley Startup Founded by Apple Engineers Lands $25 Million Series A Round

February 7, 2017

SnapRoute has raised $25 million. The Series A round was led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from lead seed investor Lightspeed Venture Partners and new investors AT&T and Microsoft Ventures.

SnapRoute, which helps network administrators create scalable and agile data centers, says the funding will allow it to accelerate development of open networking software solutions to increase their reach across Fortune 500 companies.

The Silicon Valley startup was founded by engineers from Apple. As part of the round, Norwest Partner Rama Sekhar has joined the company’s board of directors, which includes Lightspeed partner John Vrionis.

“SnapRoute is disrupting the multi-billion-dollar networking market by fundamentally changing how networks are built and scaled today,” said Rama Sekhar, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “By disaggregating software from hardware, SnapRoute is offering flexibility that has historically eluded the networking industry.”

“As network operators who built and ran networks for some of the world’s leading brands, we understand the technology required for hyper-growth and scale and that not all companies have the luxury to build from the ground up on commodity hardware,” said Jason Forrester, SnapRoute CEO and founder. “Our technology is more agile, flexible and affordable than any other offering.”

“We partnered with Jason from day one because he’s a visionary disrupting a massive market at the right time,” said John Vrionis, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “The entire networking industry is rapidly moving to an open, flexible model and SnapRoute is a leader in this new era.”

“SnapRoute is filling a gap in how network engineers work today by offering a highly scalable open networking stack, enabling engineers to work more efficiently and reduce enterprise costs,” said Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president, Microsoft Ventures.