Avi Networks
| Company type | Private (before acquisition) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Technology, Software |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Founder | Murali Basavaiah, Ranga Rajagopalan, Umesh Mahajan, Guru Chahal |
| Fate | Acquired by VMware |
| Headquarters | Santa Clara , United States |
Key people | Amit Pandey (CEO), Mark Anderson (Executive Chairman) |
| Products | Application delivery services including load balancing, application acceleration, security, operational visibility, and networking for containers |
| Parent | VMware |
Avi Networks is a technology firm focused on delivering enterprise-level application services tailored for data centers and cloud environments. Following its acquisition by VMware in 2019, Avi Networks provides a range of application functionalities including both local and global load balancing, application performance enhancement, security features, operational visibility, monitoring of performance metrics, service discovery, and networking solutions for containers. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and operates research and development, engineering, support, and sales facilities throughout Europe and Asia.
History
Established in 2012 by Murali Basavaiah, Ranga Rajagopalan, Umesh Mahajan, and Guru Chahal, the founding team had prior experience creating networking and storage solutions for data centers during their tenure at Cisco Systems.
Over the course of four venture funding rounds, the company secured $115 million. The initial investment amounted to $12.2 million, led by Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. A subsequent round raised $20.8 million with Menlo Ventures taking the lead alongside Greylock and Lightspeed, while DAG Ventures also participated. The most recent financing round brought in $60 million with Cisco Systems joining as an investor. Amit Pandey, the current CEO, has a background in leading startups such as TerraCotta and Zenprise.
In December 2018, Mark Anderson was named executive chairman.
On June 13, 2019, VMware declared its plan to acquire Avi Networks, finalizing the transaction on July 11, 2019.
Technology
Avi Networks introduced an innovative software-centric model for application delivery featuring centralized control. Its Avi Vantage Platform distinguishes the control plane from the data plane to form a distributed network of application service delivery points managed centrally. These Avi Service Engines deliver scalable load balancing, application acceleration, and security tailored to each application while continuously transmitting real-time telemetry data to the central Avi Controller for ongoing monitoring of performance, security status, and user experience.
The platform operates across bare metal hardware, virtual machines, and containerized environments within data centers as well as private and public cloud infrastructures. The Avi Controller streamlines automation of deployment, configuration, and scaling by integrating with VMware vCenter, OpenStack, various SDN controllers, public cloud providers such as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, Ansible automation tools, along with container orchestration systems including Kubernetes, Docker, and Mesos.