While the headlines won’t stop talking about the market crisis the high-tech industry is facing, as well as the end of the golden age of Israeli high-tech, today (Wednesday) another Israeli startup just announced a mega-fundraising round, as if the year was 2021.

Almost half a billion in two years

The Israeli startup DriveNets has announced the completion of a Series C funding round of $262 million. This comes after raising $208 million in 2021 which also put them in the unicorn club. The fundraising was led by D2 Investments with participation from Bessemer, Pitango, D1, Atreides, and Harel Insurance. According to our research, the current recruitment will go directly to the company's pockets, but at the same time, the company held a separate secondary funding round, as it did during its previous rounds, to buy shares for investors and employees. DriveNets is estimated to have more than doubled its value during these two years, with tens of millions of dollars in revenue and hundreds of millions of dollars in order requests.

In this age of communication, to navigate the vast amount of information while operating in existing networks, communication providers purchase huge and expensive routing solutions. This essentially means that to meet the demand, their profitability is affected, or they have to make up the additional costs, which usually come at the customers' expense– as they are the ones who see price increases. To avoid this, DriveNets’ product moves network routing to the cloud, making the provider's hardware less important.

Using the company's software, companies can build one common infrastructure that can run any communication service, anywhere, and at any volume. In fact, the company boasts that carriers can even use simple, generic, and cheap hardware, but if they have DriveNets’ software, they can still grow their network traffic volume. In practice, DriveNets allows support for a single router at a rate of 4Tb/s up to one "white box" router cluster, which supports a rate of 768Tb/s - and can support 7,680 G100 ports each. An additional advantage of their system is that because it is simple– as there are fewer different technologies and products in the way – security is higher. After all, the fewer links in the chain, the better, because one weak link can cause the whole chain to break.

DriveNets was founded in 2015 by Ido Susan (CEO) and Hillel Kobrinsky (CSO), two entrepreneurs with impressive past exits. Susan was one of the founders of Intucell, which created automatic optimization solutions for cellular networks. It was purchased by Cisco in 2013 for $475 million– Susan was just 26 at the time. Kobrinsky on the other hand co-founded Interwise, a conferencing service provider, which was acquired by telecommunications giant AT&T for $121 million in 2007. Today, DriveNets employs over 450 people in Israel, the U.S., Japan, and Romania.