Drivenets

DriveNets was founded in 2015 by Ami Lansky and Golan Oren, both of whom brought deep roots in the telecommunications networking industry. Lansky, who serves as CEO, previously held senior engineering and product leadership roles at BATM Advanced Communications and ECI Telecom, two Israeli infrastructure veterans. Oren's background spanned Cisco and other network infrastructure companies. The two co-founded DriveNets after identifying that the proprietary hardware-software bundling model dominant in carrier routing had become an obstacle to agility and cost efficiency for large operators.

The company is headquartered in Herzliya Pituach, the dense cluster of Israeli tech offices north of Tel Aviv, specifically on HaGavish Street. Additional operational presence exists in Tel Aviv for certain commercial and business-development functions. International offices are maintained in the United States — primarily to support AT&T and other North American carrier accounts — as well as in Europe and Asia, corresponding to the operator markets where DriveNets is actively deploying.

DriveNets remains a private company. In March 2022, it closed a $262 million Series C round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Koch Strategic Platforms and existing investors. That raise brought total cumulative funding above $410 million and was widely reported as valuing the company at or above $1 billion, placing it in the Israeli unicorn cohort. Prior rounds included a $110 million Series B in 2020, at the time one of the larger Israeli networking rounds in years.

The company employs approximately 500 to 600 people globally, with more than 350 of those based in Israel, concentrated in the Herzliya R&D center. The remainder are distributed primarily across the United States, where the go-to-market, sales, and customer success functions serving North American carriers are located, as well as smaller presences in Europe.

The core product is DNOS, the Distributed Network Operating System — a cloud-native, microservices-based routing software that allows telecommunications carriers to run large-scale IP routing on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) x86 servers instead of proprietary routing hardware from Cisco or Juniper.

The most consequential single event over the past 12 months has been the ongoing expansion of the AT&T deployment and the launch of Network Cloud-AI, DriveNets' adaptation of its disaggregated architecture for AI data-center fabrics — a significant pivot toward the hyperscale GPU infrastructure market. DriveNets is not a subsidiary; it is an independent private company with no parent entity.

The primary product line is marketed under the name Network Cloud, with DNOS (Distributed Network Operating System) as its technical core. DNOS is a routing operating system built entirely on a microservices architecture, deployed in containers, and designed to run on standard x86 servers from vendors such as Dell and HPE rather than on proprietary routing ASICs. It is disaggregated in the technical sense: the data plane, control plane, and management plane are separated and can be updated independently.

The specific domain problem DriveNets addresses is carrier routing ossification. For decades, operators such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and SoftBank have built their core IP networks on monolithic proprietary routers — primarily Cisco ASR 9000/NCS and Juniper PTX/MX platforms — where hardware and software are tightly coupled. Upgrading these systems requires hardware replacement cycles measured in years and vendor-controlled release schedules. DriveNets' architecture allows an operator to run routing software on commodity servers, update it via CI/CD pipelines, and scale capacity by adding servers rather than replacing chassis.

The buyer profile is exclusively Tier-1 and large Tier-2 telecommunications carriers. The internal champions are typically network architects, network operations engineers, and CTOs within the carrier's infrastructure division. The decision-making cycle is long — 18 to 36 months from proof-of-concept to commercial deployment is typical. There is no SMB segment, no self-serve channel, and no developer community product; the entire motion is enterprise sales with deep technical pre-sales involvement.

DriveNets sells exclusively through a direct, sales-led model supplemented by a formal channel partnership with Dell Technologies, signed in 2020, under which Dell resells DNOS integrated with PowerEdge servers as a validated solution for open networking. Additional hardware partnerships exist with Liqid for composable infrastructure deployments. There is no publicly disclosed presence on AWS Marketplace or Azure Marketplace.

Pricing is not publicly disclosed. Based on the nature of carrier contracts, deals are structured as multi-year enterprise agreements typically indexed to port count, bandwidth capacity, or number of network sites managed. Individual contract values for Tier-1 deployments are in the tens of millions of dollars, consistent with what operators typically spend on routing infrastructure.

The technical moat rests on several concrete capabilities: a proprietary DPDK-based packet-processing engine that achieves line-rate throughput on x86 servers, a P4-programmable data plane that allows operators to customize forwarding behavior without hardware changes, and a BGP/ISIS/OSPF stack that has been validated at Tier-1 carrier scale — which very few software-only stacks have achieved publicly. These capabilities required years of low-level systems engineering investment that competitors cannot replicate quickly.

The engineering organization works daily on DPDK, P4 runtime, Linux kernel networking, BGP/OSPF/ISIS protocol stacks, Kubernetes-based container orchestration for routing workloads, gRPC telemetry streaming, YANG/NETCONF configuration management, and integration APIs for carrier OSS/BSS platforms. The stack is low-level and systems-heavy, which defines the talent profile the company recruits for.

The flagship product is Network Cloud, centered on DNOS. DNOS provides full IP routing functionality — including BGP, OSPF, ISIS, MPLS, and SR-MPLS — running as containerized microservices on COTS servers. The first commercially deployed version went live at AT&T around 2019-2020, when AT&T publicly disclosed its adoption as part of its open-networking transformation program. Subsequent releases have added support for 400GbE line rates, enhanced telemetry, and expanded protocol coverage.

A second significant product is Network Cloud-AI, announced and developed through 2023 and into 2024. This adaptation of the DNOS architecture targets AI data-center fabrics — specifically the high-bandwidth, low-latency switching and routing fabrics that connect thousands of Nvidia GPUs or other AI accelerators within a hyperscale data center or AI-focused colocation facility. The key claim is that the same disaggregated architecture that works for carrier core routing can be adapted to the specific traffic patterns of AI training and inference workloads, where east-west bandwidth dominates.

In 2023, DriveNets also introduced Network Cloud for Enterprises, aimed at large enterprise campus and data-center deployments. This represents a deliberate market-expansion move, as all prior DriveNets deployments were with carrier customers. The enterprise edition targets large financial institutions, government agencies, and hyperscale enterprises that operate carrier-scale internal networks.

No products are known to have been formally sunset. The portfolio remains tight and focused given the company's age and capital profile — each product is an extension of the core DNOS platform rather than a fully independent offering.

In terms of platform integrations, the Dell Technologies partnership from 2020 is the most concrete public integration, providing a validated reference architecture for DNOS running on Dell PowerEdge R-series servers. FIPS 140-2 certification has been obtained for cryptographic components within DNOS, which is a prerequisite for deployment in U.S. government and defense-adjacent network environments. No public SOC 2 or FedRAMP certification is currently documented, which is consistent with the company's primary focus on commercial carrier customers rather than federal IT procurement.

The most recent notable product milestone is the 2024 demonstration of 400GbE disaggregated routing performance at trade events and in customer trials, confirming that DNOS has kept pace with the port-speed advances that the hardware-centric competitors have been shipping in silicon.

Cisco Systems is DriveNets' largest and most direct competitor. Cisco's carrier routing portfolio — the ASR 9000, NCS 5500, and NCS 5700 platforms — collectively represents the dominant installed base in Tier-1 carrier cores globally. Cisco's vertical integration of silicon (QuantumFlow, Silicon One) and software gives it deep product lock-in and a vast service ecosystem, but also makes its platforms expensive and slow to update. DriveNets' proposition to carriers is that a software-only alternative reduces Cisco's ability to extract pricing power over multi-year hardware refresh cycles.

Juniper Networks is the second major direct competitor, primarily through its PTX series (now the PTX10K line) for core routing and the MX series for edge routing. In January 2024, Hewlett Packard Enterprise completed its acquisition of Juniper for approximately $14 billion, a deal that changes the competitive dynamics by giving Juniper access to HPE's server and enterprise sales channels — a move that partially mirrors DriveNets' own strategy of coupling software with COTS hardware.

Nokia's IP Routing division (formerly Alcatel-Lucent) competes with the Nokia 7750 SR and related platforms. Nokia has made more explicit moves toward software disaggregation than Cisco, releasing its own NOS (Network Operating System) software under the SR Linux brand, which is a genuine attempt to compete in the open-networking space. SR Linux on white-box hardware is a meaningful competitive challenge to DNOS specifically in data-center and peering segments.

Arrcus, a U.S.-based startup founded in 2016, is the closest startup-profile competitor to DriveNets. Arrcus offers ArcOS, a disaggregated routing operating system, and has raised over $100 million. Unlike DriveNets, Arrcus has focused more heavily on data-center and edge deployments rather than carrier core. Both companies compete for the same disaggregated-routing budget at operators who are evaluating software-only alternatives.

DriveNets does not appear in a dedicated Gartner Magic Quadrant, as the disaggregated carrier routing segment is too nascent to have its own MQ. However, industry analysts at Heavy Reading and Dell'Oro Group have cited DriveNets specifically as the company that created the commercial template for disaggregated core routing and gave carriers a credible path away from Cisco and Juniper lock-in.

Pricing is positioned as a total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) improvement over proprietary alternatives: the software license plus commodity server hardware is intended to undercut the cost of Cisco or Juniper routing systems while delivering equivalent throughput. This positions DriveNets as cost-competitive rather than premium.

The most widely reported customer win remains AT&T's 2020 Network Cloud announcement, in which AT&T explicitly named DriveNets as the routing software underpinning its disaggregated core network transformation. This reference was the primary driver of DriveNets' ability to raise its $110M Series B in 2020 and subsequently its $262M Series C in 2022. The broader tailwind is the global operator movement toward open networking, catalyzed by initiatives such as the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and the O-RAN Alliance, which create institutional pressure for disaggregation across the network stack. The headwind is that carrier capital expenditure cycles are long, and in a period of elevated interest rates and slowing operator revenue growth, large infrastructure decisions can be delayed by 12 to 24 months.

DriveNets has not made any acquisitions of note. It is a pure organic-growth company that has reinvested its capital raises into engineering and go-to-market headcount.

DriveNets' primary office in Israel is located in Herzliya Pituach on HaGavish Street, within the same dense cluster of buildings that houses dozens of other Israeli networking and infrastructure companies. Secondary working presence in Tel Aviv supports commercial and business functions. There is no publicly documented office in Haifa, Beer Sheva, or Jerusalem.

The Israel headcount — estimated above 350 out of a global total of 500 to 600 — is almost entirely focused on R&D and engineering. Functions based in Israel include core network software engineering, protocol development, QA and test engineering, product management, system architecture, and DevOps supporting the development infrastructure. Sales, customer success, and field engineering serving North American and European carriers are based outside Israel.

No formal office relocation or large-scale expansion has been publicly announced in the 24-month window through mid-2025. The company navigated the broader Israeli tech funding pullback of 2022-2023 without announcing layoffs of the scale seen at companies such as Outbrain or WeWork Israel, suggesting that the Series C capital provided a sufficient runway buffer. The October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and subsequent war in Gaza created operational disruption for all Israeli tech companies, including DriveNets, though no specific operational update was published by the company.

Both founders — Ami Lansky and Golan Oren — are Israeli. Lansky built his career entirely within Israeli networking companies (BATM Advanced Communications and ECI Telecom) before co-founding DriveNets. The CTO and virtually all senior technical leadership are Israeli, which keeps the product vision and architectural decisions grounded in the Tel Aviv engineering culture. This also means that key technical decisions are made in Israeli time zones, consistent with the R&D center of gravity.

In Israel, DriveNets typically recruits for the following roles: senior network software engineers specializing in DPDK and packet processing; kernel-level Linux engineers; BGP/OSPF/ISIS protocol stack developers; P4 language developers; QA automation engineers with networking domain knowledge; system architects with carrier routing experience; and product managers with deep technical fluency in IP networking. DevOps and SRE roles supporting the development and CI/CD infrastructure are also regularly posted.

The notable investors with Israeli ties include Pitango Venture Capital, one of Israel's oldest and most established venture funds headquartered in Ramat Gan, which participated in early DriveNets funding rounds and represents meaningful local institutional backing. Innovation Endeavors, the fund co-founded by Eric Schmidt and Dror Berman, also participated in earlier rounds; while not exclusively Israeli, the fund has strong ties to the Israeli tech ecosystem. Bessemer Venture Partners led the 2022 Series C and maintains a presence in Israel through its portfolio activity. Koch Strategic Platforms is the strategic investment arm of Koch Industries and does not have a specific Israeli focus.

DriveNets' founders are not publicly identified as alumni of IDF Unit 8200 or Unit 81, though their deep expertise in carrier-grade networking systems suggests exposure to high-complexity technical environments. A meaningful share of the senior engineering team is drawn from Israeli defense-technology and intelligence-unit alumni, as is standard practice across Israeli networking infrastructure companies. The engineering culture at DriveNets is described by people familiar with it as intensely technical and protocol-focused, with a strong preference for engineers who understand the OSI stack from Layer 1 through Layer 7 and have experience with large-scale network operations rather than purely cloud-native development backgrounds.