The network infrastructure market is undergoing a resurgence of interest as the demands of AI increase requirements and opportunities.
Traditional network documentation and management approaches are proving inadequate for modern infrastructure demands, creating opportunities for platforms that can provide comprehensive visibility and automation capabilities. That’s what NetBox Labs aims to deliver.
Today the company announced it has raised $35 million in a Series B funding led by NGP Capital with participation from new investors Sorenson Capital and Headline. All existing investors participated in the round, including Flybridge Capital, Notable Capital, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and IBM. The round brings the company’s total funding to $55 million and reflects growing enterprise adoption of NetBox as a standardized approach to network infrastructure management.
NetBox Labs was spun out from DNS platform provider NS1, which was acquired by IBM in 2023. The company’s core open-source NetBox technology has emerged as a de facto standard for network documentation and infrastructure planning. The platform’s open-source foundation has enabled widespread adoption, while the commercial offerings provide enterprise-grade capabilities for organizations managing complex, mission-critical infrastructure.
“We think that infrastructure management all in is due for an uplift, and NetBox is at the center of that in a position of a lot of strength because of the data gravity, represented in the NetBox install base,” Kris Beevers, co-founder and CEO of NetBox Labs, told Network World. “Everybody already uses NetBox because of the open source dynamic; there are hundreds of thousands of installs out there of the software which affords us a vantage point that’s really unique to build the modern infrastructure management stack, and that spans a lot of territory.”
How NetBox works and why it matters
NetBox serves as a system of record for infrastructure teams, Beevers said. “It is the data model into which they’re documenting and planning all of their infrastructure.”
The platform’s technical foundation centers on modeling infrastructure relationships in detail. The NetBox model encodes realistic relationships, such as an IP address’s provision on an interface, where the interface is on the switch, and where the switch sits in a rack.
In addition, NetBox Labs has expanded the core platform with complementary products that address operational pain points while leveraging the central data repository.
NetBox Discovery provides automated network device and service discovery, maintaining continuous synchronization between documented infrastructure state and actual deployments. The discovery engine identifies configuration drift and populates NetBox with real-world topology data, solving the perennial problem of outdated network documentation in dynamic environments.
The NetBox Assurance technology that builds on discovery became generally available in April. It provides configuration compliance and drift detection capabilities that are becoming essential for security and operational excellence. The platform continuously compares intended infrastructure state as modelled in NetBox with deployed configurations, identifying deviations.
The market response to assurance capabilities has been particularly strong. “Probably about 40% of the customers that are coming to us these days are buying Assurance,” Beevers noted.
AI infrastructure demands drive market growth
The AI infrastructure boom has created unprecedented demand for sophisticated network management capabilities, particularly among organizations deploying large-scale GPU clusters and high-performance computing environments. CoreWeave, one of the fastest-growing AI cloud providers, exemplifies this trend as one of NetBox Labs’ largest customers.
“They’re managing all of their data center infrastructure and networking out of NetBox,” Beevers said. “The big value proposition for them is that they build big AI data center infrastructure faster than everybody else. They pumped out 25 or 30 data centers last year. A big part of how they do that is by automating it all.”
This use case demonstrates NetBox’s role in enabling infrastructure-as-code approaches for rapid data center deployment. Organizations can model data center designs in NetBox, generate automated provisioning scripts, and maintain comprehensive operational oversight through the platform’s monitoring and compliance capabilities.
AI-powered infrastructure intelligence
Beyond helping infrastructure operators to support AI needs, NetBox is also building out its own AI capabilities.
NetBox Operator, which is currently in development, represents a technical leap toward AI-driven infrastructure operations. The agent-based platform uses large language models (LLM) to enable natural language interaction with infrastructure data and automate complex operational procedures that traditionally require deep domain expertise. The NetBox Operator uses the company’s Nitro platform, which provides tuned AI models for networking.
The technical innovation centers on NetBox’s structured relationship data, which provides the contextual framework necessary for AI systems to reason intelligently about infrastructure.
“Relationships are really, really important to enable LLMs and agents to reason about and interact with the data of the infrastructure,” Beevers explained. “Without it, you know, you’re just throwing a bunch of raw data at a model that doesn’t know how to think about the connections between elements of your infrastructure.”
Future plans and market expansion
NetBox Labs operates across several primary technology areas that define its expansion strategy.
Beevers explained that the company thinks about five core areas: infrastructure, operations, observability, automation and security. The company maintains an aggressive development pace with frequent product releases.
Multiple new products are in development across the company’s focus areas. “We have a lot of new work happening, especially in observability, security analytic and more AI products in the next couple of weeks,” Beevers said.
Source:: Network World