Pica8 raises $20M more to battle Cisco

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Pica8, the original open networking software provider, now setting its sights on meeting F500 enterprise customer demands for software defined networking (SDN) solutions not offered by legacy vendors such as Cisco, announced today that it has raised over $20 million in Series C funding. WI Harper Group and Aspiro Capital Management led the round, with all existing investors, including anchor investor Vantage Point Ventures, participating in the new financing. The new round of capital will support the continued aggressive build-out of the company's market-leading product roadmap and scaling of customer engagement and support functions.

In addition to closing the Series C funding, Pica8 adds three new board members to help move the company forward: Brad Bullington, Co-Founder & General Partner, Q6 Capital, and former-CEO of BridgeLux, who comes to Pica8 with 20+ years of executive management and investment experience in emerging technology categories; Ming Hsu, Managing Partner, Aspiro Capital Management; and Joyce Lee, Vice President, WI Harper Group.

"We could not be better positioned for the perfect storm of market trends that are attracting this new round of investment," said James Liao, Founder and CEO of Pica8. "First, last year's flurry of open networking M&A activity, led by the acquisitions of Cumulus and Big Switch, affirmed the magnitude and timing of the opportunity, while at the same time, making us the stand-alone banner carrier for end-to-end enterprise open networking. And enterprise open networking is key to handling the explosion of edge applications in IoT, automation, fintech, and smart infrastructure. This new investment allows us to serve notice to legacy networking vendors that an end-to-end – access edge, to campus, to private cloud data center – commercially supported Network Controller and Linux-based open networking solution for the enterprise are here. We're not just a NOS anymore."

"With Pica8 now the de facto technology and market leader in open networking for the enterprise – serving well over 1,000 customers today – this new funding round will allow the company to expand on the 'triple play' of: greater performance, feature robustness and lower cost, which are unavailable from legacy vendors," said Brad Bullington, Co-Founder & General Partner, Q6 Capital, and new Pica8 Board member. "It will also allow them to lead the industry discussion on enabling enterprise-wide automation and promoting open networking disaggregation in the Enterprise."

Pica8 Inc.