People and businesses are relying on the internet to get things done more than ever before, an opportunity but also an infrastructure headache for service providers that need to scale quickly and reliably to meet that demand.

Today, a startup that has built a clever, software-based way for them to expand their networks without buying costly equipment is announcing a major round of funding on the back of its business booming.

DriveNets — which provides software-based routing solutions to service providers that run them as virtualized services over “white box” generic architecture — has closed $208 million in funding, a Series B that values the company at over $1 billion post-money.

The plan will be to use the funding to continue building out the business internationally and to tailor it to more use cases beyond carriers, including the wave of bigger companies that stream large amounts of media and have some control over their networks as a result.

Future deals are still under NDA, CEO Ido Susan said, but he described the opportunity as a clear one: “If you want to serve bandwidth with low latency, if you want to offer strong 5G capability or cloud gaming, you need to be close to your end customer.”

The Series B is being D1 Capital Partners. Previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and Pitango (which co-led DriveNets’ previous, $110 million round when it emerged from stealth) also made a significant investment, and Atreides Management also participated. This latest round was made at more than double DriveNets’ valuation in 2019.

D1 has been an especially prolific investor in the last year, going big on businesses that are seeing a lot of attention as a result of pandemic conditions. They include e-commerce giants Warby Parker and Instacart, fintech TransferWise, gaming engine Unity, online car sales platform Cazoo, and transportation startup Bolt.

DriveNets’ big round is based both on bigger trends in the market, as well as its own strong record.

Before this round, DriveNets had already counted AT&T among its customers, a major vote of confidence for the company and its virtual network approach, but it seems that recent circumstances and the spike in internet activity have brought more providers to consider its approach.

“The internet was growing 30%-40% annually even before Covid-19,” said Susan. “But even five years ago, incumbent carriers were coming to us saying, said no one can build virtual networks. Now, it’s not a question of whether it works or not, but when you will adopt it.”

Recent momentum for the company’s sales, he said, is very good. “Everyone is working and studying from home so you need more capacity and bandwidth in the network,” he added. 

DriveNets’ core product is a more flexible and cost-effective replacement for the traditional network router that relies on virtualized architecture. Traditionally, routers have been sold as vertically-integrated hardware solutions, bringing together both software and hardware into one branded big box, with companies like Cisco and Juniper Networks dominating the space.

In their place, as Susan and co-founder Hillel Kobrinsky envisioned it, DriveNets provides a solution that is based around generic white boxes. It currently works with three providers for these boxes, Susan said.

These work in conjunction with a system it has developed called Network Cloud, which in turn runs a networking stack called the DriveNets Operating System. Service providers control their systems of white boxes and other servers through a virtualized service run over Docker containers, using open APIs to automate and configure various network services.

This allows for more flexibility in capacity among the white box servers, but they can also be easily added and removed as needed. Essentially, it’s a system that disaggregates the software from the hardware, to make expanding the hardware much easier, and controlling the software significantly more flexible to boot.

(Ironically, my conversation with Susan took place over Zoom with him in his home office, which also doubles as a DIY workshop. So with a full array of hardware equipment surrounding Susan, we talked about how software would come to dominate the world.)

It’s a disruptive concept that potentially steps on a lot of toes, but Adam Fisher, a partner with Bessemer, said that he’s confident it’s one that will continue to gain traction.

“We are extremely enthusiastic about the company,” he said. “Aside from Ido and Hillel as entrepreneurs, we really connected with their vision. Network routing is moving to software and cloud architecture. We’re talking not just about the small parts here but the hearts and lungs of the system. DriveNets is starting with the hardest parts. Once one customer becomes multiple customers, you just realise it’s the future.”

After acquiring Optimizely last fall, content management company Episerver is adopting the Optimizely name for the entire organization.

CEO Alex Atzberger told me that the company will be rolling out new branding in the next coming months, as well as renaming its entire product suite to reflect the Optimizely brand.

“We believe it’s no longer just about personalizing the experience or driving recommendations,” Atzberger said. “The brand and word Optimizely really signifies optimal performance. Companies today of any size, any scale [need to be] much more sophisticated in terms of how they digitally connect with their customers. It’s a never-ending story.”

At the same time, he emphasized that Episerver is making the change from “a position of strength,” with the combined company seeing double-digit revenue growth last year and going live with more than 250 new customers.

Asked whether adopting the Optimizely name was always part of the post-acquisition plan, Atzberger replied, “When we acquired Optimizely, we knew that we would be acquiring not just a great product, not just a great customer base, but also acquiring a very well-known brand. We had not yet decided on [rebranding], but it was certainly something that, for me, was part of the consideration.”

In addition to announcing the new company name, Episerver/Optimizely is also announcing a new platform that it’s calling Optimization-as-a-Service, which integrates aspects of Optimizely and Episerver products to offer web targeting, testing and recommendations. As Atzberger put it, this new platform allows customers to determine “who to show something to, what content to show and how to actually show this content.”

Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came out of stealth with a new product and announced a $10 million seed investment led by Wing Venture Capital.

Company co-founder Edo Liberty says that he started the company because of this fundamental belief that the industry was being held back by the lack of wider access to this type of database. “The data that a machine learning model expects isn’t a JSON record, it’s a high dimensional vector that is either a list of features or what’s called an embedding that’s a numerical representation of the items or the objects in the world. This [format] is much more semantically rich and actionable for machine learning,” he explained.

He says that this is a concept that is widely understood by data scientists, and supported by research, but up until now only the biggest and technically superior companies like Google or Pinterest could take advantage of this difference. Liberty and his team created Pinecone to put that kind of technology in reach of any company.

The startup spent the last couple of years building the solution, which consists of three main components. The main piece is a vector engine to convert the data into this machine-learning ingestible format. Liberty says that this is the piece of technology that contains all the data structures and algorithms that allow them to index very large amounts of high dimensional vector data, and search through it in an efficient and accurate way.

The second is a cloud hosted system to apply all of that converted data to the machine learning model, while handling things like index lookups along with the pre- and post-processing — everything a data science team needs to run a machine learning project at scale with very large workloads and throughputs. Finally, there is a management layer to track all of this and manage data transfer between source locations.

One classic example Liberty uses is an eCommerce recommendation engine. While this has been a standard part of online selling for years, he believes using a vectorized data approach will result in much more accurate recommendations and he says the data science research data bears him out.

“It used to be that deploying [something like a recommendation engine] was actually incredibly complex, and […] if you have access to a production grade database, 90% of the difficulty and heavy lifting in creating those solutions goes away, and that’s why we’re building this. We believe it’s the new standard,” he said.

The company currently has 10 people including the founders, but the plan is to double or even triple that number, depending on how the year goes. As he builds his company as an immigrant founder — Liberty is from Israel — he says that diversity is top of mind. He adds that it’s something he worked hard on at his previous positions at Yahoo and Amazon as he was building his teams at those two organizations. One way he is doing that is in the recruitment process. “We have instructed our recruiters to be proactive [in finding more diverse applicants], making sure they don’t miss out on great candidates, and that they bring us a diverse set of candidates,” he said.

Looking ahead to post-pandemic, Liberty says he is a bit more traditional in terms of office versus home, and that he hopes to have more in-person interactions. “Maybe I’m old fashioned but I like offices and I like people and I like to see who I work with and hang out with them and laugh and enjoy each other’s company, and so I’m not jumping on the bandwagon of ‘let’s all be remote and work from home’.”

Bloomreach, an API company that helps eCommerce customers with search and web site creation, announced a $150 million investment today from Sixth Street Growth. Today’s funding values the company at $900 million.

At the same time, the company announced it has acquired Exponea, a startup that gives Bloomreach a marketing automation component it had been missing. The two companies did not reveal the acquisition price, but along with the pure functionality, the company gains 200 additional employees, which is significant, considering Bloomreach had 300 prior to the acquisition. It also gains 250 net new customers, giving it a total of 750.

“Historically, we have had two major pillars of the business — the search part of it and the content part,” Bloomreach CEO and co-Founder Raj De Datta told TechCrunch. The content management component lets customers build websites, while the search powers the search box, navigation and merchandising. He points out that all of it is powered by an underlying data analysis engine that matches data to people and people to products.

Exponea will give the company more of a complete platform of services, allowing marketers to target and personalize their marketing messages across multiple channels. De Datta says the two companies had similar missions and made a good fit. “We have a common vision and common sort of product direction. […] Both companies are data-driven optimization technologies[…] and both are entrepreneurial product-driven companies,” he said.

It also helped that they had been partnering together for six months prior to the sale, which has now closed. Exponea was founded in 2016 in Slovakia and has raised over $57 million, according to Pitchbook data. The plan is to leave Exponea as a stand-alone product, while finding ways to integrate it more smoothly with the other components in the Bloomreach platform. They expect the integration parts to happen over the next year.

While De Datta did not want to share specific revenue figures, he did say that the company had a record second half as business was pushed online due to the pandemic. Michael McGinn, partner at Sixth Street and co-head at investor Sixth Street Growth doesn’t see the demand for eCommerce abating, even post-COVID, and that will drive a need for more customized online shopping experiences.

“Technology serving more bespoke customer experiences is a rapidly expanding market and we are pleased to join Bloomreach in its leadership of the digital commerce experience and marketing sector,” McGinn said in a statement.

De Datta says the money was used in part to buy Exponea, but he also plans to invest more in engineering to continue building the product line. The ultimate goal is an IPO, but as you would expect, he wasn’t ready to commit to any timeline just yet.

“I wouldn’t say we have a timeline, but our goal is that the company over the course of 2021 should make investments towards that, so that it’s an option for us.”