Data-centric startup Fungible scores $200 million Series C led by SoftBank to transform the future of data center infrastructure

Fungible, a data-centric computing startup, has closed $200 million in Series C financing to accelerate the company’s product development and to ramp sales and marketing efforts. The round was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund and included participation from Norwest Venture Partners and existing investors. To date, Fungible has raised over $300 million in capital from venture capitalists and strategic investors including Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Redline Capital and Walden Riverwood Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, Fungible announced that Deep Nishar will join its board of directors.

Founded in 2015 by Bertrand Serlet and Pradeep Sindhu, the California-based Fungible is an early-stage startup creating a hardware plus software platform for data centers. Central to its mission is a chip responsible for data movement. This chip is low latency, high throughput, and highly programmable.

“As the global data explosion and AI revolution unfold, global computing, storage and networking infrastructure are undergoing a fundamental transformation. Fungible’s products enable data centers to leverage their existing hardware infrastructure and benefit from these new technology paradigms,” said Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We look forward to partnering with the Company’s visionary and accomplished management team as they power the next generation of data centers.”

Fungible was founded by Silicon Valley veterans Pradeep Sindhu and Bertrand Serlet. Sindhu previously founded Juniper Networks, held roles as CEO and CTO, and is now chief scientist. Prior to Fungible, Serlet founded a storage startup and before that was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple.

“Our vision is to provide such dramatic improvements to the performance, reliability and economics of data centers that applications previously unimaginable become possible,” said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and CEO of Fungible. “Every significant advancement in technology is ultimately enabled by a step-function improvement in one of its fundamental building blocks; the Fungible Data Processing Unit (DPU)™ is a new essential building block that represents just such a step-function improvement.”

The DPU is an entirely new category of programmable processor, complementary to existing processor categories, that will enable an order of magnitude improvement in the execution of data-centric workloads. 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.