Network infrastructure automation startup NetBox Labs Inc. is hopeful of growing its relevance among the world’s biggest data center operators after closing on $35 million in Series B funding today.

The round was led by NGP Capital and saw participation from Sorenson Capital and Headline, plus existing investors Flybridge Capital, Notable Capital, Mango Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and IBM Corp.

The startup is the main commercial steward and contributor to the open-source NetBox project, which is a networking infrastructure management stack that helps data center operators to make sense of the complexity of their rapidly growing networks. It acts as the central nervous system for data center networks, and has become an increasingly vital tool for companies who are racing to scale their infrastructure in support of new artificial intelligence applications and systems.

With NetBox Cloud, data center builders get access to feature-rich application programming interface-based functionality for tasks such as IP address management, data center resources management and other essential networking tasks. The project is more than nine years old, and it offers companies a cleaner solution for understanding, modeling, operating, automating and securing networks than using messy spreadsheets, which are still used by many organizations to manage tasks such as drive device provisioning. It enables simple, automated testing of new networking resources, update monitoring and more besides.

NetBox Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Kris Beevers says the NetBox platform is fast becoming the new standard for building and managing the networking infrastructure needed for AI-native data centers. He explains that it helps companies to expand and modernize the infrastructure needed to ensure their AI platforms remain quick, resilient, secure and manageable.

“NetBox is now a ubiquitous platform at the heart of a composable network and infrastructure management stack, with adoption soaring even more as AI drives massive demand for infrastructure,” he insisted.

The platform has certainly proven popular, with the open-source version of NetBox attracting more than 18,000 stars on GitHub, while its commercial offering NetBox Cloud is now being used by “thousands” of enterprises as their network’s source of truth. Those customers include several dozen Fortune 500 organizations, including data center hyperscalers, AI scale-ups and various government agencies globally.

One of its most recognizable customers is CoreWeave Inc., the publicly traded data center operator that offers rented access to thousands of powerful, cloud-based graphics processing units for AI workloads. CoreWeave has raised billions of dollars recently from its market debut and debt financing rounds, and is scrambling to build out its infrastructure to support its rapid growth.

According to CoreWeave’s head of networks Jim Julson, NetBox has become a crucial element of its operations. “We’re building dozens of new AI data centers every year, and they’re full of complex infrastructure,” he said. “NetBox is crucial for accelerating our timelines with automation. Deploying our infrastructure even a month sooner as the result of these efficiencies directly impacts our revenue, and NetBox enables streamlined operations and automation once infrastructure is in production.”

As the primary contributors to the open-source NetBox, NetBox Labs has led a growing number of partners and contributors to deliver a stream of new features to the platform. Recent updates include NetBox Discovery, which is a system for automating network and device discovery, NetBox Assurance, for finding and fixing infrastructure that drifts from its intended state, and NetBox Operator, which is an agentic AI operations tool that accelerates automation for networking teams.

NetBox Labs has quadrupled its staff in the last two years, but it isn’t done yet. With the money from today’s funding round it will continue to hire in all areas to scale and meet market demand, particularly across its customer success, marketing, sales, engineering and product teams.

NGP Capital partner Upal Basu said NetBox Labs has built an extremely valuable tool for expanding complex, modern networks. “Its impressive commercial growth validates our belief that it can become the de facto platform for network operations, observability, automation and security,” he added. “Every infrastructure team in the world knows NetBox.”

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