Pensando Systems Receives Nearly $35M In New Funding ...

Edge computing startup Pensando Systems has brought in additional funding totaling nearly $35 million, the startup told CRN exclusively.

Prem Jain, CEO of Pensando, told CRN that the new dollars came from three investors: Ericsson Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Liberty Global Ventures, the global investment arm of Dutch telecom giant Liberty Global.

“Some investors were very excited about coming in, and we also thought that would be a great opportunity to save some investment money for the future,” Jain said of the new funding.

Pensando’s most recent funding was raised in November from a Series C round. The latest funding, which is also part of the company’s Series C, brings the startup’s total raised to $312.95 million, the San Jose, Calif.-based company told CRN.

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Ericsson and Qualcomm, two strong players in the 5G market, are particularly excited for Pensando’s software, especially as the IT market transitions away from boxes. Pensando will be working with large service providers to help them make the shift to container-based solutions that can offer the scale and performance that these companies require, Jain said.

Today, Pensando is coming to the market with its system that is based on a custom programmable processor optimized for edge computing. The solution is powering software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services to transform existing architectures into secure and fast environments that are being required by next-generation applications.

The company now has 274 employees, according to LinkedIn.

The upstart, which counts former Cisco CEO John Chambers as its one of its founders and current chairman, was founded in 2017 and

emerged from stealth

by empowering enterprises and rival cloud providers to outperform the dominant public cloud leader. 

Despite supply chain issues, demand for all things cloud propelled the company, which met its revenue expectations in 2020. And revenue in 2021 will “far exceed” 2020’s numbers, Jain said.

“From the development perspective, as well as business perspective, the business is looking very, very positive,” he said.

A big part of the company’s strategy is partnership. Pensando counts HPE, Dell, and VMware as its systems partners, and ServiceNow and Splunk as its integration partners, to name a few. The company has multiple Fortune 500 customers that are going into production this year, according to Jain.

“We’re going to continuously adapt,” he said. “We will not be able to do everything ourselves. We are very focused on what we can do the best and then partner with other companies to see how can we take advantages of some of the new technologies within the market and bring it to our customers.”

Right now, Jain and his company are head’s-down focused on taking its cloud customers into production. After that, it’s about finding new areas of opportunities with partners HPE and Dell, as well as furthering its engineering and software development.

Pensando’s board of advisers includes executives from Aruba Networks, Equinix, and HPE. Pensando is on the lookout for more cloud partners to join, Jain said.

Alongside Jain, Pensando was founded by a team of former Cisco executives, including Mario Mazzola, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani.

The company in 2019 announced it had inked contracts with Oracle, an AWS cloud rival, Goldman Sachs — which has also been a past investor — and NetApp.