Nvidia sprinkles its gold dust on Arrcus

• Virtualised routing vendor Arrcus has raised another round of funding
• Its new roster includes AI chip giant Nvidia
• Arrcus is pitching its platform on Nvidia’s high-performance computing processors

Adding Nvidia’s name to anything these days is akin to sprinkling gold dust and that’s just what virtualised routing vendor Arrcus has been able to do in announcing its latest round of funding, as the AI chip giant is among the vendor’s new investors. 

Arrcus, which is pitching its Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE) Multi-Cloud Networking (MCN) solution to network operators in the telecom, enterprise and cloud or datacentre sectors, has raised $30m in its new round from Nvidia, Prosperity7 Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, General Catalyst, Clear Ventures, Liberty Global and Lightspeed. This takes the total raised in equity funding since Arrcus was formed in 2016 to $157m. 

The San Jose, California-based company said it will use the new capital to “expand platform support, accelerate growth, and continue delivering cost-effective and transformational networking solutions to customers worldwide.” 

The company, which now has about 150 employees, doesn’t share its financial details, but told TelecomTV it has booked multiple “seven-figure” contracts during the past few years and expects to achieve an operating profit in 2026. 

It also noted that it currently has more than 50 customers, including Japan’s SoftBank (an investor), Liberty Global (also an investor), Saudi Arabia’s Aramco Digital (which is headed up by former Rakuten Mobile chief Tareq Amin) and datacentre operator CoreSite (part of the American Tower empire), as well as “many of the top-10 global market cap companies in the world,” the names of which cannot currently be shared.    

SoftBank is one of the companies that has combined Arrcus software – in this specific case the vendor’s SRv6 Mobile User Plane (MUP) application for 5G network slicing – with Nvidia hardware in the form of the chip vendor’s BlueField DPU (data processing unit) for high-performance computing functionality. According to Arrcus, while its scalable, programmable, microservices-based software can be deployed “on various form factors, including data processing units (DPUs), merchant silicon, and compute” platforms from multiple vendors, including the likes of Intel and Broadcom, when used in conjunction with Nvidia’s BlueField DPU it gives customers the capabilities to “efficiently offload, accelerate, and isolate compute-intensive networking applications like security and traffic engineering. With the advent of GenAI applications, this gives customers the ability to have high-performance secure connectivity within the datacentre, while delivering higher utilisation and power efficiency for compute-intensive workloads,” noted the vendor in its funding announcement. 

“We are thrilled to welcome Nvidia as our latest investor and look forward to building on our collaboration,” stated the company’s chairman and CEO, Shekar Ayyar. “Arrcus’s leading networking software, coupled with Nvidia’s AI infrastructure, will help deliver maximum efficiency to customers from datacentres as well as their edge and cloud computing environments,” he added.

And, as with many other industry developments right now, the heat is all around AI and the impact of AI services and workloads on IT platforms and the networks that connect them. Ensuring that the network connections between datacentres, edge nodes and other distributed compute platform locations have the capacity and power to deal with the high demands placed on them by growing AI-related traffic flows is critical to the companies seeking to enable the AI era. As the Arrcus team noted to TelecomTV, the role of the “network infrastructure that goes alongside supporting AI datacentres and GPUs [graphics processing units]” is increasingly coming under scrutiny. “An efficient network fabric is needed to extend GPU clusters to distributed points for inferencing as well as optimising the use of expensive processor cycles,” noted the vendor.

And this is where Arrcus is hoping to pick up further business and more industry traction, and it will certainly be helped in that regard by having Nvidia on board as an investor as well as a technology partner. 

“Modern networks are evolving to address customer needs in the era of AI,” noted Kevin Deierling, senior VP of networking at Nvidia. “We’re collaborating with Arrcus to provide high-performance, secure and cost-efficient datacentre networking for a variety of accelerated computing applications,” he added. 

And there’s the gold dust…

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV