Plexxi Raises $35M Series D Funding

NASHUA, N.H. Plexxi, a converged networking and SDN supplier, today announced that it has raised a $35 million round of financing to continue the company’s rapid growth in the software-defined agile datacenter market. The round was led by a new investor with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

The investment in Plexxi is recognition of the company’s groundbreaking approach and market adoption in building a new generation of software-defined data centers that deliver a flexible, agile architecture for new scale-out application and cloud services offerings.

“We are experiencing a generational shift to a new era of IT in which applications and data are rapidly increasing demand for a new agile and scale-out networking architecture,” said Rich Napolitano, CEO of Plexxi. “Plexxi represents a transformative converged networking and application-centric approach to traditional legacy networking. 2015 has been a record-breaking year for Plexxi as we gain a foothold in federal, financial services, education and service providers markets here in the United States and around the world.”

According to a recently published report by Dell’Oro Group, the layer 2-3 Ethernet switch market is expected to exceed $25 billion in 2019.   The latest financing round brings Plexxi’s total funding to $83 million. The infusion of capital will help fuel the rapid expansion of Plexxi’s sales, marketing, customer support, and research and development efforts as it accelerates the company’s vision of a software-defined architecture in datacenters and service provider networks.

Plexxi announced Napolitano as CEO in November 2014 as it readied the company for commercialization. Since his introduction, Plexxi has been focused on gaining customers across three rapidly growing markets: agile datacenters, scale-out application infrastructure and distributed cloud co-location service providers.

Plexxi