Investment banking firm Goldman Sachs led a $35m series C round for US-based network management and verification platform developer Forward Networks on Tuesday.
Venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Threshold Ventures and A Capital also took part in the round. Threshold Ventures (then called DFJ Venture) had led the company’s $16m series B round in August 2017, investing alongside Andreessen Horowitz and A Capital.
Founded in 2013, Forward has created software that generates a digital copy of a network, allowing administrators to visualise the entire infrastructure, debug issues, verify user access policies at scale and predict network behaviour before applying any changes.
The platform is aimed at large and complex network infrastructures that have grown beyond manual management techniques. It allows enterprise customers to make their networks more reliable, reducing business risk and avoiding outages.
The capital has been allocated to increased sales and marketing activities, continued investment in research and development and Forward’s planned expansion into new regional and vertical markets.
Joshua Matheus, managing director of technology at Goldman Sachs, said: “In the past year, we have scaled our deployment of Forward Enterprise to our entire network of over 15,000 devices.
“Our network engineering team relies on the Forward platform to be the single source of truth for our network. It is a critical component for automating our infrastructure.
“The team here has been so impressed with the scalability and network analysis functionality of Forward Networks’ solution that we decided to lead its funding round.”
The company emerged from stealth in 2016 with a funding round of undisclosed size led by Andreessen Horowitz. A regulatory filing showed it had raised approximately $11.2m in 2014.