The San Jose company teaching enterprises to run their networks like hyperscalers - open, vendor-agnostic, and built on SONiC plus AI.
Above: the Aviz Networks wordmark and tagline. The concentric rings echo the company's core promise - concentric layers of open software wrapped around commodity switching silicon.
For most of the last thirty years, buying a corporate network meant buying a bundle: the switch, the silicon inside it, and the operating system that ran on top - all from a single vendor, all locked together. Aviz Networks was founded in 2019 on the opposite premise. The company builds a software stack around SONiC, the open-source network operating system that Microsoft originally created to run its Azure data centers, and sells the support, orchestration, visibility, and now artificial intelligence that make it usable by ordinary enterprises rather than just cloud giants.
The pitch is simple to state and hard to execute: let companies network the way hyperscalers do. Hyperscalers run open, disaggregated networks - hardware from one supplier, software from another, all interchangeable. That flexibility historically required an army of in-house engineers. Aviz packages the missing pieces into products so a bank, a hospital, or a retailer can adopt SONiC without hiring that army.
Its stack spans three environments that increasingly blur together: the data center, the network edge, and what the industry now calls the "AI factory" - the dense, GPU-packed clusters that train and serve large models. In each, Aviz's argument is that the constraint is no longer raw bandwidth but visibility and control. You cannot operate what you cannot see, and closed systems, the company argues, show you only what the vendor wants you to see.
That thesis has attracted an unusual roster of backers. Aviz has raised roughly $31 million, and among its investors are companies it competes against or sells alongside - Cisco chief among them. When an incumbent funds a challenger aimed at the open end of its own market, it is worth paying attention.
"Aviz helps customers build Networks for AI and integrate AI into Networks."
Aviz went from two products to four in a single year. Each one attacks a specific job in running an open network - deploying it, seeing inside it, testing it, and now talking to it in plain language.
The Open Networking Enterprise Suite: a single control center for running SONiC across any hardware, ASIC, or vendor, bundling 24x7 expert support with orchestration, observability, and automation.
A software-defined packet broker built on SONiC that delivers full traffic visibility on commodity switches - pitched explicitly as a lower-cost alternative to Gigamon and cPacket.
A generative-AI assistant that connects to existing tools and returns answers, analysis, and automation in plain English - vendor-agnostic by design, so it reads across the whole estate.
FTAS predicts how a SONiC network will behave before it is deployed, catching problems in the lab instead of in production.
Aviz sells to enterprises and service providers that want the economics of open networking without giving up support or reliability. Its named verticals span a wide swath of the economy:
The recurring complaint Aviz answers is lock-in - being unable to change silicon, switch vendor, or cloud without ripping out the software too. The stack targets a handful of concrete pains:
The closed incumbents - Cisco, Arista, Juniper - sell an integrated stack that is polished but bound to their own hardware and software. Aviz takes the opposite stance: it refuses to standardize on one chip, one switch, or one cloud, and treats that refusal as the product. Its software runs across multiple ASICs and switch brands, and its Network Copilot reads across whatever tools a customer already owns.
Against the pure open-source route - grab SONiC from GitHub and run it yourself - Aviz's differentiator is the wrapper: 24x7 support, orchestration, pre-deployment testing, and now a GenAI operator. That is the gap between a free operating system and a production network.
Against specialized point vendors, Aviz competes head-on. Its Open Packet Broker is a direct, software-defined answer to Gigamon and cPacket, trading proprietary appliances for commodity switches running SONiC.
And the AI angle cuts both ways. Aviz builds networks for AI - the fabrics that carry GPU traffic - and puts AI into networks through Copilot. Playing both sides of the same wave is a large part of why strategic investors from Cisco to Qualcomm Ventures wrote checks in a single round.
Aviz has raised approximately $31 million across seed, a strategic round, and a Series A. The November 2024 Series A was led by Alter Venture Partners, with Qualcomm Ventures and Celestica joining existing backers.
Investors: Alter Venture Partners · Cisco Investments · Qualcomm Ventures · Celestica · Moment Ventures · Wistron · Accton
Vishal Shukla, CB Perumal, and Gautam Agrawal launch Aviz to bring open-source SONiC to enterprises.
Seed backing from Moment Ventures, Accton, and Wistron to modernize data-center and edge networks.
Cisco Investments backs Aviz to accelerate enterprise SONiC support and services.
Alter Venture Partners leads with Qualcomm Ventures and Celestica; the GenAI Copilot ships, taking the line to four products.
Co-founder and chief executive; champions an AI-first, vendor-agnostic approach and authored "Deciding the Future: Building New Networks for the AI Era."
Co-founder leading research and development.
Co-founder leading product and marketing.
Aviz is a commercial open-source and SaaS business. The underlying SONiC operating system is free; the company charges for the layer that makes it enterprise-ready.
Estimated annual revenue: ~$5M (third-party estimate).
| Partner | What they do together |
|---|---|
| Cisco | Strategic investor; Aviz Service Node and Network Copilot run on Cisco UCS with NVIDIA acceleration. |
| Red Hat | Simplifying AI-factory and enterprise orchestration with ONES, ASN, and Copilot on RHEL and OpenShift. |
| NVIDIA | GPU/AI-accelerated networking deployments. |
| Broadcom | Silicon partner for SONiC on Broadcom ASICs. |
| Edgecore | Open switch partner positioning Aviz in the "Networking 3.0" stack. |
| Celestica | Switch hardware partner and Series A investor collaborating on open observability. |
| Macnica | Distribution partner extending reach across Japan and APAC. |
It provides software and 24x7 support that let enterprises run open, vendor-agnostic networks built on the open-source SONiC operating system - adding orchestration, observability, and AI-driven operations across the data center, edge, and AI factory.
SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) is an open-source network operating system originally created by Microsoft for Azure. Aviz makes it enterprise-ready so companies can avoid proprietary switch software and vendor lock-in.
Aviz has raised about $31M total. Its November 2024 $17M Series A was led by Alter Venture Partners, with Qualcomm Ventures and Celestica joining existing investors Cisco Investments, Moment Ventures, Wistron, and Accton.
ONES for running SONiC on any hardware, the Open Packet Broker for software-defined traffic visibility, the GenAI Network Copilot for plain-language operations, and FTAS for pre-deployment validation.
Enterprises and service providers across e-commerce, education, government, financial services, healthcare, GPU/NeoCloud, retail, and telco that want open, multi-vendor networks without proprietary lock-in.