Network automation startup Netris has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the company announced in June 2026. The funding will be used to hire engineers and sales staff, expand support for additional hardware vendors, and develop further functionality in its automation platform.
Netris provides software that runs directly on network switches and offers a platform that automates the setup, configuration, and ongoing operations of GPU clusters for neocloud operators — companies building data centers to offer AI inference and training services. The platform also handles network abstraction and hardware-layer isolation, enabling neoclouds to serve multiple customers from the same infrastructure.
CEO Alex Saroyan said the core challenge Netris addresses is speed to market. Getting a data center ready to offer AI cloud services can take months, and idle GPUs during that period represent significant costs. “As a GPU cluster operator, you need to make configuration changes to every link, every day,” Saroyan told TechCrunch. He noted that traditional software-defined networking falls short for AI workloads because of the volume of traffic involved. “For AI, software is not okay, because the amount of traffic is so high, everything must be hardware accelerated,” he said.
Saroyan emphasized that Netris does not use AI in its own platform, relying instead on algorithms the company developed over its eight years in operation. “AI is not deterministic,” he said. “For changing many thousands of switch configurations, you don’t need to be creative. You need to be very persistent and repeatable.”
The platform is vendor-agnostic and compatible with networking equipment used with both Nvidia and AMD servers. Netris is currently live at more than 35 GPU clusters worldwide, totaling approximately one million GPUs, with customers including Lightning AI, Foxconn, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, TensorWave, and Telus. Nvidia recommended Netris to several of its customers after a product demo two years ago.
a16z partner Guido Appenzeller will join Netris’ board as part of the deal.
Source: TechCrunch