Our Investment in Innovium: Next Generation Cloud Data Center Networks

The secular move to cloud has created a multi-billion dollar market opportunity for the next generation of cloud-focused networking technologies. Imagine a future with new levels of networking bandwidth, performance, scalability, and in-built support for cloud management and security. Innovium has assembled one of the industry’s strongest Ethernet networking silicon teams to help make that future a reality.

Today Innovium is announcing that the company has raised over $50 million in funding, across two over-subscribed rounds. Greylock Partners led Innovium’s Series B financing in October 2015, and we joined their board of directors.

Innovium was founded in December 2014 by three very talented and experienced semiconductor executives: Rajiv Khemani, Puneet Agarwal and Mohammad Issa. Puneet and Mohammad were the lead architect and head of engineering, respectively, for Broadcom’s Ethernet switching business. They successfully delivered multiple generations of products and played key roles in helping build Broadcom’s product leadership in this area. Rajiv was at Cavium for a decade from startup through IPO, and was COO before he left.

The founders have attracted and assembled one of the industry’s strongest Ethernet networking silicon engineering teams. They have also recruited two experienced go-to-market executives – Andy Rava as VP Business Development, and Amit Sanyal as VP Marketing. Andy was previously VP of WW Sales at Cavium, and Amit previously led marketing for multiple data-center networking product lines at Dell and Cisco. A number of cloud providers and networking vendors are closely engaged with Innovium for the company’s initial product line.

The company has built an experienced board of directors, with strong relevant industry domain and operating backgrounds. The board includes Dipender Saluja (Capricorn), Mark Stevens (S-Cubed), and Lip-Bu Tan (Walden, Cadence). Qualcomm Ventures is also an investor in Innovium.

Greylock is no stranger to the cloud networking markets – we were fortunate to have previously invested in Arista Networks. Innovium joins a distinguished list of cloud and enterprise investments at Greylock including AppDynamics, Cloudera, Docker, Palo Alto Networks, Pure Storage and Workday.

Mobile, video, big data, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and other cloud services are all driving new cloud networking requirements. While today it is broadly understood that the cloud is driving wide-spread business disruption and new opportunity, we have barely begun. Information movement to, from, and within the cloud promises to be massively faster and more economical in the future, and will unleash new unforeseen capabilities.

We look forward to working closely with the Innovium team, to help deliver on that future, and to help build the next-generation leader in cloud data center networking silicon.