Celebrating the Latest Milestone in Our Decade-Long Partnership with Pradeep Sindhu

Fungible’s announcement today of the SoftBank-led $200 million Series C round of funding marks the latest milestone in our partnership with Pradeep Sindhu. It is recognition of his team and co-founder Bertrand Serlet’s big vision to build a new systems company for the big-data age, their ability to attract top flight talent, and the fulfillment of their promise to deliver their first product, three years after founding.

I first met Pradeep at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2010. As the legendary founder of Juniper Networks, who served as CEO, CTO and is still Chief Scientist there, I was honored to get to know him. Later that year Juniper Networks acquired Mayfield portfolio company Ankeena Networks, and I saw how Pradeep was a tech visionary who understood the value of complementary teams and technology. We stayed in touch, and in 2015 when he had the idea to form a start-up for the data-centric era, we started to have deeper discussions. I still remember all the modalities we explored for how Fungible could be formed and worked together on the spinout from Juniper.

I had not met Bertrand but of course knew him by reputation as the father of Apple’s software stack.  When Pradeep shared that Bertrand would be his co-founder, I knew that the founding team was complete. In 2016, Pradeep and Bertrand shared their hand-written slide deck on an iPad, a first for us, which articulated their vision to build a data processing unit (DPU). Through all our investments in big-data and cloud-native companies, and our belief in the Renaissance of Silicon trend, we knew that their proposed solution was a painkiller, not a vitamin, and that they had the talent and hunger to execute it.  We proudly led their Series A round of financing.

Today, they are unveiling the DPU, an entirely new category of a programmable processor, complementary to existing processor categories, that will enable an order of magnitude improvement in the execution of data-centric workloads.  As a result of the dramatic improvements to the performance, reliability and economics of data centers, new applications previously unimaginable will become possible.  The DPU can be deployed in data centers at all scales and geographies, placing Fungible in a strong position to capture a significant portion of the $120+ billion data center infrastructure market.

I am inspired every day by my interactions with Pradeep, an empathetic and focused CEO, who keeps the long game in mind. We are honored to be partners on their journey as he, Bertrand and their team establish Fungible as a built-to-last company.