Tagged: sdn
9 results
Vishal Shukla
Vishal Shukla is the co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks, a San Jose-based company building an AI-first, vendor-agnostic networking platform on top of the open-source SONiC operating system. A networking veteran with more than 20 years of experience, he previously held leadership roles at Cisco, IBM, Mellanox (NVIDIA), and Nortel. He holds 25-plus granted patents, has authored books on SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack, and wrote 'Deciding the Future: Building New Networks for the AI Era.' Under his leadership Aviz raised a $17M Series A in November 2024 (roughly $31M total), backed by investors including Cisco Investments and Qualcomm Ventures.
Megaport
Megaport is an Australian network-as-a-service company that lets enterprises spin up private, high-speed connections between data centers and the major public clouds in minutes rather than months. Through a software-defined network spanning more than 1,100 enabled data centers across some 30 countries, Megaport replaces the fixed contracts and manual provisioning of traditional telecom with on-demand, elastic bandwidth billed by the hour. Its platform - centered on Virtual Cross Connects, the Megaport Cloud Router and Megaport Virtual Edge - connects over 4,000 customers to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and hundreds of other providers. Listed on the ASX as MP1, the company is now extending from connectivity into compute as it builds toward a globally distributed AI inference cloud.
Allied Telesis
Allied Telesis is a global networking infrastructure company that designs, manufactures, and supports wired and wireless products - switches, routers, firewalls, wireless access points, transceivers, and the software that manages them. Founded in Japan in 1987, it builds resilient, standards-based networks for governments, schools, hospitals, transportation systems, and smart cities, with a focus on automation (its Autonomous Management Framework), reliability, and supply-chain security.
Keith Southard
Keith Southard runs Allied Telesis, the San Jose-headquartered networking company building switches, routers and software-defined infrastructure used everywhere from US military bases overseas to smart-city deployments. He took over as CEO of Allied Telesis Capital Corporation in 2008 and has stayed at the controls ever since, quietly steering a 1,900-person company through the awkward transition from hardware vendor to network-automation outfit.
Peyman Kazemian
Peyman Kazemian is the co-founder of Forward Networks, a Santa Clara-based enterprise software company that builds mathematically accurate digital twins of complex networks. His PhD dissertation at Stanford - which became the foundational Header Space Analysis framework - won the NSDI 2024 Test-of-Time Award and directly spawned a company now trusted by Fortune 50 enterprises and U.S. government agencies. A graduate of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and Stanford's electrical engineering department under Prof. Nick McKeown, Kazemian helped develop OpenFlow and SDN before turning his research into a business that has raised over $140 million to transform how enterprises understand, secure, and manage their networks.
Forward Networks, Inc.
Forward Networks builds a vendor-agnostic network digital twin - a mathematically accurate model of cloud and on-prem networks that lets enterprises query, verify, and harden infrastructure that has long since outgrown human capacity to reason about.
Ankur Singla
Ankur Singla is a three-time founder and serial entrepreneur who has built and exited companies totaling over $676 million in acquisitions. Currently Founder & CEO of Exaforce, an agentic AI-driven Security Operations platform based in San Jose, California, Singla is on a mission to give cybersecurity defenders a 10x productivity advantage. Before Exaforce, he founded Volterra (acquired by F5 Networks for $500M in 2021) and Contrail Systems (acquired by Juniper Networks for $176M in 2012 just nine months after founding). With a background spanning SDN, NFV, edge computing, and now agentic AI, Singla has consistently been at the frontier of enterprise infrastructure. Exaforce raised $75M in Series A funding in April 2025 and $125M in Series B in May 2026, reaching a $725M valuation.
David Erickson
David Sterling Erickson is the CEO and co-founder of Forward Networks, a Santa Clara-based company that pioneered the network digital twin. A Stanford PhD in Computer Science and one of the original architects of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Erickson co-founded Forward Networks in 2013 with three fellow Stanford PhD graduates to give enterprises mathematically accurate, real-time models of their networks - enabling visibility, compliance verification, and security posture management across complex multi-vendor environments. Under his leadership, Forward Networks has raised over $140M in funding, achieved 139% ARR growth, and serves marquee customers including Goldman Sachs, PayPal, and Telstra.
Martin Casado
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm's infrastructure practice. A Spanish-born computer scientist and entrepreneur, he pioneered software-defined networking (SDN) by inventing the OpenFlow protocol during his Stanford PhD. He co-founded Nicira Networks, which VMware acquired for $1.26 billion in 2012, where he then scaled the networking and security business to $600 million in annual revenue. An ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award winner, Casado now invests in cutting-edge infrastructure and AI companies, serving on boards of over a dozen startups while shaping the future of enterprise technology and AI regulation policy.