The company behind NetBox - the open source source of truth that thousands of engineering teams use to document, model, and automate their networks.
Ask a network engineer where the definitive record of their infrastructure lives, and you will often get an uncomfortable answer: a spreadsheet. NetBox Labs exists to replace that spreadsheet with something teams can actually automate against.
NetBox Labs is the commercial company behind NetBox, an open source platform that has become, in the words of its own team, "the world's most popular source of truth for documenting, modeling, and automating networks and infrastructure." The project began in 2016 as an internal tool built by network engineer Jeremy Stretch at DigitalOcean, released to the world under an open source license. In the decade since, it grew into a fixture of network engineering - the tool practitioners reach for on their own, before any vendor sends an invoice.
The company was formed in 2023 to be the steward of that project. Its founding CEO, Kris Beevers, had previously co-founded and run NS1, a managed DNS company. When IBM acquired NS1's core business in 2023, the NetBox effort spun out as an independent company - carrying forward a tool NS1's own engineers had adopted internally.
What NetBox actually does is deceptively simple. It holds an accurate, structured model of a network: the devices, the racks, the IP addresses, the cables, the virtual machines, the relationships between them. That model becomes the "source of truth" - the thing automation systems, monitoring tools, and engineers all trust to answer the question "what is supposed to be here?"
The problem it solves is the gap between intention and reality. Networks drift. Someone makes a change at 2 a.m., another team reconfigures a switch, and slowly the documentation and the live network stop agreeing. That divergence is where outages hide. NetBox Labs is building the tools to close it.
NetBox has become the linchpin of modern network and infrastructure automation architectures, and we've deepened our ecosystem of partnerships with every key provider in the space.
Kris Beevers - Co-founder & CEO, NetBox Labs
NetBox Labs follows an open-core model: the core project stays free and open source, while commercial editions add the hosting, security, and automation features that large organizations need.
The free, Apache-licensed core. Built in Python on Django with PostgreSQL, it documents and models networks and infrastructure as an automation-ready source of truth.
A fully-hosted edition of NetBox - secure, easy to run, and ready to scale without a team managing the underlying infrastructure.
A fully supported self-managed edition with enterprise features, plus an Air Gap option for the most isolated, high-security environments.
Gathers real network and infrastructure data and ingests it into NetBox, rapidly documenting the actual IT footprint to accelerate intent-based automation.
Continuously identifies, analyzes, and reports on operational drift - the deviations between how infrastructure should be configured and how it actually is.
An AI-powered assistant that helps teams explore, understand, and act on their NetBox data in plain language.
NetBox's reach starts from the bottom up. Tens of thousands of engineering teams run the open source version worldwide. Among the commercial customers are dozens of Fortune 500 companies, hyperscalers, AI scale-ups, global network providers, and government agencies - organizations whose networks are too large and too critical for a spreadsheet.
The typical user is a network engineer, an infrastructure or DevOps team, or a platform operator: the people responsible for knowing what is deployed, where, and why. As Beevers frames it, these teams "trust NetBox Labs to operate, understand, automate, and secure their infrastructures."
Most networks are still documented in tools never meant for the job - spreadsheets, wikis, and tribal memory. That works until scale breaks it. At ten thousand devices, the master spreadsheet becomes the single largest source of risk in the building: outdated, error-prone, and impossible to automate against.
NetBox turns that record into a structured, queryable model. Discovery keeps it grounded in what actually exists; Assurance flags when reality drifts from intent. The payoff is automation you can trust, because it runs against data you can trust.
The market for infrastructure documentation is not empty. Legacy DCIM and IPAM tools, network discovery products from vendors like Device42, NetBrain, Infoblox and SolarWinds, and broad CMDB platforms such as ServiceNow all overlap with parts of what NetBox does. And, of course, the incumbent everyone actually competes with is the spreadsheet.
NetBox Labs' distinction is its open source foundation. Rather than a closed product sold top-down to executives, NetBox spread bottom-up through the engineers who use it daily. That adoption built trust and a community of hundreds of contributors before the company monetized a single feature.
Its second distinction is philosophy: NetBox is built to be automated against, not just looked at. The data model is designed as an API-first source of truth that plugs into automation pipelines - which is why it has become a common anchor point in modern network automation stacks rather than a static inventory.
The company's stated values reinforce the approach - "own it," "keep it simple," and "community first." The last one is not decoration: the creator of NetBox carries the title Chief NetBox Officer, and the open source project remains free under the Apache 2 license even as the commercial business grows around it.
The $35M Series B, announced July 14, 2025, was led by NGP Capital, with Sorenson Capital and Headline joining as new investors and existing backers Notable Capital, Flybridge, Two Sigma, Mango, Salesforce Ventures, and IBM participating.
The earlier $20M Series A was led by Flybridge Capital, with GGV Capital, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, IBM, Founder Collective, Entree Capital, and Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt.
The company said the Series B would fund hiring across customer success, engineering, marketing, product, partnerships, and sales to meet global demand.
Jeremy Stretch's internal DigitalOcean tool is released to the world under an open source license.
Kris Beevers and co-founders launch the company as commercial steward of NetBox after NS1's sale to IBM.
Flybridge Capital leads the round to drive the open source transformation of networking.
A fully supported self-managed edition debuts, including an Air Gap option for secure environments.
New products target automated discovery and continuous operational drift detection.
NGP Capital leads the round, bringing total funding to $55M amid AI-driven infrastructure demand.
Previously co-founded and led NS1 (managed DNS) through its acquisition by IBM before founding NetBox Labs.
The original creator of NetBox, who built it as a network engineer at DigitalOcean in 2016.
Co-founders include COO Salil Jani, CTO Shannon Weyrick, CPO Mark Coleman, and CRO Bill Lapcevic.
NetBox was born as an internal side project at DigitalOcean in 2016 - not as a product anyone set out to sell.
The first 10,000 GitHub stars took about six years. The next 10,000 took four.
The project ships roughly one release every ten days, sustained by hundreds of contributors.
The person who created NetBox now holds the literal title "Chief NetBox Officer."
Product demos, tutorials, and community talks from the NetBox Labs channel.
YouTube - DemoWalkthroughs of NetBox Cloud, Discovery, and Assurance in action.
YouTube - InterviewThe CEO on network automation, open source, and the road from NS1.