The plumbing behind the digital world, now with a source of truth
Kris Beevers runs a company most people will never notice, which is more or less the point. NetBox Labs, where he is co-founder and CEO, builds the system of record that network and infrastructure teams lean on when a data center goes live, a bank reconfigures its backbone, or an AI cloud spins up thousands of machines. The work is unglamorous by design. When it goes right, a deployment simply happens faster and nothing breaks.
The company sits at 99 Wall Street in New York and is the commercial steward of NetBox, an open-source project that quietly became the default source of truth for network engineers across the industry. Beevers describes what NetBox Labs delivers plainly: "We provide teams with a modern, automated, trustworthy system of record for everything from networks to AI infrastructure." In July 2025 the company raised a $35 million Series B led by NGP Capital, pushing total funding to $55 million and bankrolling a hiring spree across engineering, product, sales, and customer success.
What makes the bet interesting is the timing. As artificial intelligence pushes companies to build data centers at a furious pace, the networks connecting all that hardware have grown more complex and less forgiving. Beevers puts a number on the gap that keeps him in business: roughly 65% of network changes are still made manually, often through error-prone spreadsheets. "There's a race to expand and modernize the complex infrastructure that keeps every aspect of today's digital world quick, resilient, secure, and manageable," he has said.
NetBox is now a ubiquitous platform at the heart of a composable network and infrastructure management stack, with adoption soaring even more as AI drives massive demand for infrastructure.
Kris Beevers
Building on a tool everyone already trusted
The origin of NetBox Labs is a story about noticing what was already working. Before this company, Beevers co-founded and led NS1, which built DNS and application-delivery infrastructure for major internet and enterprise companies. IBM acquired NS1 in 2023. During those years, Beevers kept running into the same open-source tool. "The origin of NetBox Labs is deeply tied to open source," he explains. "While I was CEO of NS1, we saw NetBox being used everywhere."
Rather than invent a competitor, he went to the source. He hired Jeremy Stretch, the engineer who created NetBox, gave him the title of Chief NetBox Officer, and spun out a dedicated company to make the project more powerful and accessible at enterprise scale. It is a founder move that trades novelty for adoption: start with a base of tens of thousands of users who already rely on the software, then build the enterprise layer around it. The customer roster reflects that reach, spanning hyperscalers like CoreWeave, enterprises like JPMorgan Chase, and government agencies at local, state, and federal levels.
An engineer, first and always
Beevers is quick to define himself. "I'm a software engineer by training and a startup founder at this point in my career," he says. The training runs deep. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an unusual credential for a startup CEO, and he still keeps a GitHub account under the handle "beevek" with open-source projects like a C++ library and an asynchronous MongoDB driver for Python.
The infrastructure obsession started early and almost by accident. Beevers launched his first company, a file-sharing startup, during the dot-com boom. The product itself was not the hook. Building the at-scale infrastructure to keep it running was. That pull carried him to Voxel, where he built CDN, cloud, and bare-metal products before the company sold to Internap in 2011, and then into NS1 and DNS, where he became a recognized authority on global application delivery. "Over the years, I've worked on some of the hardest problems in the internet-scale infrastructure space," he says, and the resume backs it up.
You don't need a big balance sheet to move quickly. You need clarity, discipline, and a tight feedback loop with the people who depend on what you're building.
Kris Beevers on how infrastructure companies get built
A philosophy of fundamentals over hype
For someone who has raised tens of millions across two companies, Beevers is notably skeptical of capital as a solution in itself. His advice for founders reads like a warning against the industry's louder instincts: "Focus relentlessly on the fundamentals: building products that solve real problems, engaging deeply with customers, and creating a culture that values execution over hype." He frames money as an accelerant, not an engine. "Capital can accelerate growth, but it's great product, great people, and operational focus that create lasting impact."
That operating style has produced results that are easy to measure. NetBox Labs grew revenue roughly fourfold year-over-year for two consecutive years and doubled its team in 2025. The company's stated ambition is expansive without being vague: to build the world's ecosystem for managing the most complex networks, replacing manual, spreadsheet-driven operations with automation that teams can actually trust. Newer products point the direction, including an AI assistant called NetBox Copilot and a drift-detection tool, NetBox Assurance, aimed at catching configuration problems before they spread.
The person behind the platform
Beevers is described by those who know his work as an engineer at heart, someone "perennially interested in too many things," as his ONUG member profile puts it. He is based in New York and, between building companies, spends time at the Jersey Shore to recharge. There is a symmetry worth noting in his current chapter: IBM, the company that acquired his last venture, is now an investor in NetBox Labs, alongside NGP Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures.
The through-line across two decades is consistency of interest rather than reinvention. Beevers found a corner of technology that fascinated him early, the deep infrastructure that makes the internet fast and reliable, and he has stayed there through a Ph.D., an acquisition, and now a company built on the counterintuitive insight that the best foundation was open source all along. As AI reshapes what infrastructure has to do, the systems of record underneath are getting a hard second look. Beevers has spent fifteen years preparing for exactly that scrutiny.