US-based switch chip technology startup Barefoot Networks emerged from stealth on Tuesday having raised more than $130m of funding, including $57m in a recent round co-led by internet technology provider Google.
Google, which now operates as part of the Alphabet group, co-led the round with investment bank Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investments unit. It also included four undisclosed “industry-leading” strategic investors and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.
Founded in 2013, Barefoot Networks is developing network switch technology that can facilitate the transfer of data between the connected devices used by app developers and operators, and internet service providers.
The company’s chips can be programmed using the open-source P4 programming language, which means data centre operators can customise them for their own use, deciding which features are used for their individual networks.
Martin Izzard, Barefoot’s co-founder and CEO, said: “Mega-scale data centre operators greatly benefit from building their own networking equipment and writing the software that runs on it. The forwarding plane, though, has been off-limits to programmers because of the rigid nature of high-performance switching solutions.
“With P4 and Barefoot, the landscape is changing; users can develop the P4 programs to define the innovative forwarding plane behaviour, introducing new ways to monitor and analyse network traffic, making networks more reliable, scalable, efficient and secure.”