DriveNets has raised $410 million in Series D funding, valuing the Israeli networking company at $8.5 billion and bringing total funding to $1 billion. The round was led by Bessemer and Atreides, with AMD joining the new investors.
The company is attacking a bottleneck that appears after the GPU spending spree. In large AI data centers, thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs must exchange data constantly; if the network is too slow or narrow, expensive accelerators wait idle. CEO Ido Susan framed it bluntly: the most expensive idle asset is a GPU waiting on the network.
DriveNets sells the network fabric that connects those accelerators, and it insists on standard Ethernet rather than NVIDIA’s proprietary InfiniBand and NVLink stack. The bet is that AI facilities will become more heterogeneous, mixing chips and systems from different suppliers, and will need open networking rather than another lock-in layer.
AMD’s participation makes the signal sharper. A chip vendor trying to compete with NVIDIA in compute is backing a company that challenges NVIDIA’s networking moat. DriveNets also has operating proof points: founded in 2016, cash-flow positive since 2025, more than $1 billion in committed orders, and customers including AT&T, Comcast, hyperscalers and large model labs.
Sources: CocoLoop, PR Newswire, Globes, Calcalist