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Forward's mission is to transform networks to be agile, predictable, and secure.
Business has become increasingly complicated. The rapid flow of data from inside and outside the organisation has rendered top-down planning difficult and often ineffective especially in an enterprise network setting. Forward Networks provides a solution with a digital twin, creating an accurate copy of a company's network architecture so planners and developers can see how their activities will affect operations across the entire network.
Although digital twinning is a relatively new concept, made possible only by recent advances in AI, there is already intense competition for this space. Forward Networks has carved out a unique niche in focusing on enterprise networks rather than the organisation as a whole, a focus which is needed given the complexity of modern hybrid networks which can span several cloud environments. This has led to Forward Networks picking up major clients such as Tesltra, Paypal, and Ubisoft.
In 2023, Forward Networks completed a Series D funding round led by MSD Partners, with participation from Goldman Sachs, one of its long-term customers. This investment will help develop its product, expand the services available to its customers, and scale its core team as business continues to grow.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Jan 2023
$50m
SERIES D
Oct 2019
$35m
SERIES C
This company has top investors
David Erickson
(Co-Founder & CEO)David holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford. He is a contributor to the OpenFlow spec and the author of Beacon, the OpenFlow controller at the core of commercial products from Big Switch Networks, Cisco, and others, and open source controllers such as Floodlight and OpenDaylight.
Brandon Heller
(Co-Founder & CTO)Brandon received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford. Involved in OpenFlow before it had that name, he served as main editor of the spec for three years, seeing it grow from an academic prototype to a real tool for industry. His more recent projects include energy-efficient data centers (ElasticTree) and flexible network emulation (Mininet).
Nikhil Handigol
(Co-Founder)Nikhil is a Computer Science PhD from Stanford. As a member of the Stanford team that pioneered SDN/OpenFlow, his research focused on using SDN principles for systematic network troubleshooting (NetSight), flexible network emulation (Mininet), and smart load-balancing (Aster*x). Previously, he worked at SDN Academy, ON.Lab, and Cisco.
Peyman Kazemian
(Co-Founder)Peyman received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. His dissertation showed novel ways to troubleshoot and verify the correctness of networks. Previously, he created and taught SDN Academy courses, worked at Google and Ericsson, and was part of the team at Stanford that developed OpenFlow and SDN.
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