Augtera Networks today announced that it has raised $4 million for the industry's first AI platform for networks. The company's solution, which is built from the ground up for networks, brings the benefits of AI-augmented operations, planning and orchestration to physical, virtual and cloud network environments. The funding will enable Augtera to expand operations to support existing and rapidly growing production deployments across Global 1000 companies, scale strategic partnerships and accelerate adoption.

Bain Capital Ventures led the round with participation from aCrew Capital. With this announcement Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures and former CEO of Symantec, joins Augtera's board of directors.

As enterprises, cloud and service providers continue to adopt software defined networking, data center fabric designs, hybrid cloud and white box switches, networks have become increasingly complex, fragmented and difficult to operate. As a result supporting business agility and providing network uptime necessary for increased revenue growth, while minimizing operational expense, have become significant pain points for network designers and operators alike. Augtera's product provides a holistic solution to this problem by applying machine learning to networking data and enables multiple orders of magnitude of benefit while addressing these pain points.

"The current paradigm of building and operating networks relies on engineering and operations teams to manually mine and find needles in an increasingly large and multi-layered haystack of data," said Rahul Aggarwal, founder and CEO, Augtera Networks. "These teams are not able to leverage the richness of the network data and their work flows are reactive while serving applications, customers and users that depend on the network," continues Aggarwal. "Augtera's proprietary AI technology powered by a holistic network model, finds the needles in the haystack automatically and proactively and enables a paradigm shift."

"Networks have become highly complicated, and management solutions to date have not kept up," said Salem. "Augtera has built a ground-breaking AI system with algorithms designed specifically for networks, and we are already witnessing the efficacy and commercial potential of its highly-differentiated product in a number of customer environments. As an early investor, we are thrilled to partner with Rahul and Bhupesh and look forward to playing an active part in the company's growth and success."

"We are excited to be partnering with Rahul and Bhupesh, who bring world class domain expertise that is needed to unlock the tremendous value of applying machine learning to the networking domain. We look forward to our journey ahead with them," said Theresia Gouw, co-founder of aCrew Capital.

Founded by industry veterans Rahul Aggarwal and Bhupesh Kothari, Augtera has developed proprietary algorithms with over two years of R&D to apply machine learning to the networking domain. These algorithms have been built and matured using production data from nine very large scale networks. AI applications that leverage these algorithms are custom built for networking constructs. These AI applications are powered by Augtera's platform, which provides the data plumbing, network models, scale, visualization, ecosystem integration and agility needed to bring the benefits of AI to complex and dynamic networking environments.

About Augtera

Augtera Networks is the provider of industry's first AI platform built from the ground up for networks. The Augtera team consists of industry-leading technologists from Juniper, Cisco, Nokia, Facebook and several successful startups having collectively shipped widely deployed products that have created billions of dollars in value across networking, routing, distributed systems, machine learning, big data and automation environments.

About Bain Capital Ventures

Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. The firm invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from SaaS, infrastructure software and security to fintech and healthcare to commerce and consumer tech. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, Lime, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, Rubrik, SendGrid and SurveyMonkey. Bain Capital Ventures has $5.2 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn and Twitter.

About aCrew Capital

aCrew Capital is an early stage venture capital firm engaging in long term partnership with teams uniquely suited to solve big, hard problems. aCrew is a thesis driven firm focusing on cybersecurity & infrastructure, financial services, re-imagining the workplace, data platforms, and community activated networks. aCrew's team has backed founders building transformative companies including cybersecurity providers Cato Networks, Exabeam, Forescout Technologies, and Silverfort; fintech companies Chime, Finix, and Pie Insurance; enterprise SaaS provider Gusto and consumer platforms including Hotel Tonight.