networking
(35)
The network that sells itself
Ubiquiti turned affordable hardware and shared know-how into a $3.27 billion business. The interesting part is how much of the selling happens before a salesperson enters the picture.
DriveNets makes the network stop waiting
First it helped AT&T take the router apart. Now DriveNets is applying the same idea to AI: expensive chips should spend more time computing and less time waiting for data.
IABC EMENA gives the conversation more time than the stage
Five speakers, five minutes each, then time to talk. Across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, IABC EMENA is building a professional network around what happens when communicators stop presenting and start comparing notes.
PRSSA SDSU gets students into the room
An agency visit, a two-hour pitch, a conversation after the panel. San Diego State’s PRSSA chapter makes a communications career something students can try before graduation.
AIGA Los Angeles Wants More Designers in the Room
Founded by design heavyweights, AIGA Los Angeles now puts its connections to work through free events, public-school education and a community-built logo archive. Its most useful offering is a way into the profession.
The LAB Miami Is Selling the Room Where It Happens
From a 700-square-foot experiment to a two-building founder campus, The LAB Miami has spent years making introductions tangible. Its latest bet: put the right people together, then give them a reason to come back.
ASUS keeps giving the PC a new shape
From a $399 netbook to a laptop with two screens, ASUS has made a business of moving the computer off its usual perch. Its next challenge is making ambitious hardware easier to own.
Myriad360 Is Betting Big on the Work Behind AI
The systems integrator is buying expertise, assembling infrastructure and handling the unglamorous details of enterprise technology. Its next test is keeping the personal touch as the business gets bigger.
Cinos wants your next meeting to start on time
From Pernod Ricard’s meeting rooms to a cruise fleet’s control centre, Cinos tackles the unglamorous engineering that lets people get on with their jobs. Its best work gives users less to think about.
TPx Built the IT Sidekick for 25,000 Businesses. Then a $1.1 Billion Debt Load Became the Villain
TPx spent a quarter-century turning phone lines into an all-in-one technology service. Its 2026 restructuring reveals both the value of that model - and the price of financing growth with too much debt.
The 45-Year-Old Satellite Shop That Turned Coastal Virginia Homes Into One Big Remote Control
Two brothers started Domes in 1980 selling satellite dishes the size of a kiddie pool. Forty-five years later the family is still wiring Coastal Virginia's living rooms - just with a lot fewer visible wires.
The Company That Hides the Tech So Your House Just Works
A 20-year-old Greenville integrator built a business on a simple bet: the best home technology is the kind you forget is there. The hard part isn't the gadgets - it's the wiring, the calibration, and the phone that still gets answered a year later.
The Recruiter Who Went Rogue for Women in the C-Suite
Tracy Saunders spent two decades placing executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco. Then she flipped the model - and built a discreet network that gets senior women hired, paid and promoted without the noise.
The Blinking Box in Your Closet Is Quietly Becoming a Software Company
NETGEAR has spent 30 years making the box that blinks in your closet. Now it is trying to turn that hardware into recurring revenue - and in 2025, for the first time in five years, the bet moved the numbers.
Global Unichip Corporation (GUC)
The Taiwanese design house that quietly builds other people's AI chips - and reserved 60,000 CoWoS wafers to keep doing it.
Hivebrite
The community platform built for impact - combining a flexible engagement engine, AI agents, and expert support to help organizations turn scattered members into active networks.
Cisco
The company that quietly wired the internet is now betting its next chapter on securing and connecting the machines that run artificial intelligence.
Startup Grind
Startup Grind is a global community for entrepreneurs, running founder-focused local events in hundreds of cities and a flagship annual conference in Silicon Valley. Started in 2010 as a small gathering in the founder's office and now powered by Google for Startups, it connects early-stage founders with investors, operators, and mentors through chapters, memberships, and online content.
Netmaker
Netmaker is an open-source virtual networking platform built on WireGuard that automates fast, secure, distributed mesh networks across clouds, data centers, edge sites, and devices. Founded by former IBM cloud engineers Alex Feiszli and Dillon Carns, it lets teams stitch together servers, containers, IoT devices, and remote users into a single flat, encrypted network - a kind of VPC for distributed systems. A YC W22 company, Netmaker pairs a widely adopted open-source project with paid Professional and Enterprise editions aimed at businesses and managed service providers.
Pally
Pally is an AI relationship management platform that pulls together a person's connections from across iMessage, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, email, calendar and X into one intelligent inbox and personal CRM. Its AI researches what each contact does and posts online, surfaces who you should reconnect with, prepares you for meetings, and tracks relationship strength - built for founders, investors, salespeople and recruiters who live and die by their networks. Founded in 2024 by Haz Hubble and Wyatt Lansford, Pally is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch.
CNBC CEO Council
CNBC CEO Council is an invitation-only community of chief executives assembled and run by CNBC. It connects CEOs across industries, geographies and stages of growth with each other, with CNBC's editorial team, and with policymakers and global newsmakers through off-the-record dinners, digital briefings and the flagship CNBC CEO Council Summit. Part of the broader CNBC Councils portfolio, it is designed as a peer forum for candid, actionable conversation on the forces reshaping business - from tariffs and supply chains to AI, healthcare and capital markets.
Step
Step is a new-media and events company that runs one of the largest technology festivals in the Middle East and North Africa. Founded by Ray Dargham in 2011, it stages the annual Step Conference in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, publishes tech newsletters and social platforms like StepFeed, and connects founders, investors and builders. From a first edition of roughly 100 people, it has grown to draw more than 8,000 attendees, with startups featured on its stages collectively raising billions in funding. In 2026 the company extended its model to San Francisco with an AI-focused edition.
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems is an American multinational technology company and the world's largest maker of networking hardware. Founded in 1984 by two Stanford computer scientists, it builds the routers, switches, silicon, security, and software that route much of the world's internet traffic. Today Cisco is repositioning around AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and observability - anchored by its 2024 acquisition of Splunk - while remaining the default backbone for enterprise, service-provider, and government networks.
Broadcom
Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) is one of the world's largest semiconductor and infrastructure-software companies, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Led by President and CEO Hock Tan since 2006, it designs custom AI accelerators, Ethernet switching and routing silicon, wireless and broadband chips, and optical components, while also running a large enterprise-software business anchored by VMware, Symantec, CA and Brocade. Its products connect and power much of the modern internet, from smartphones and set-top boxes to the hyperscale data centers training today's largest AI models.
Marvell Technology
Marvell Technology is a Santa Clara-based fabless semiconductor company that designs the chips underpinning modern data infrastructure. Founded in 1995, it has pivoted under CEO Matt Murphy from consumer and mobile silicon into custom AI accelerators (XPUs), electro-optics, high-speed Ethernet switching, DSPs and storage controllers. Its parts move data inside and between the hyperscale data centers run by companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, making it one of the key merchant and custom silicon suppliers powering the AI buildout.
Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks is a Nasdaq-listed enterprise networking company that designs wired and wireless infrastructure - switches, Wi-Fi access points and SD-WAN - and pairs it with cloud-managed, AI-driven software. Built around ExtremeCloud IQ and the newer Extreme Platform ONE, the company delivers cloud and increasingly AI-native networking to more than 50,000 customers worldwide, from NFL stadiums and hospitals to schools, factories and retailers. Headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina, it competes with Cisco, HPE Aruba, Juniper and Arista by pitching a single, simpler platform that unifies networking, security and analytics.
Traefik Labs
Traefik Labs builds the cloud-native networking layer that sits between your users and your services. Its flagship open-source Traefik Proxy - downloaded more than 3 billion times - auto-discovers containers and routes traffic without hand-written config, and its commercial Traefik Hub extends that into a unified 'Triple Gate' platform covering API, AI, and MCP traffic. Founded in France in 2016 and now headquartered in San Francisco, the company's stated goal is to make networking boring: reliable enough that developers stop thinking about it.
Louisa AI
Louisa AI is a New York-based relationship intelligence platform, spun out of Goldman Sachs in 2023, that maps who-knows-who and who-knows-what inside an organization. By reading daily market news against a firm's internal relationship graph, it proactively nudges the right colleague with the right warm lead at the right time - what founder Rohan Doctor calls 'systematizing serendipity.' It sells mainly to investment banks, private capital, consulting and law firms as a cross-sell and deal-origination engine.
ngrok
ngrok is developer infrastructure that puts any app, API, or AI model online with a single command. What began in 2013 as one engineer's weekend project to learn Go is now a unified ingress platform - reverse proxy, firewall, API gateway, and global load balancer rolled into one - used by more than 5 million developers and trusted by companies like GitHub, Twilio, Zoom, and HashiCorp.
Women In Product
Women In Product is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and global community of more than 30,000 women and non-binary product professionals. Founded in 2016 out of a casual networking event in Silicon Valley, it equips members to thrive as builders, leaders, and changemakers through an annual conference, local chapters, leadership programs, peer mentorship, and online resources - with a particular focus on closing the gender gap at the mid-career, senior, and executive levels where it is widest.