Bringing the company’s total funding to $125m, modern application and access networking firm NS1 has raised a $40m series D venture funding round to support its continued innovation and development of modern foundational technologies that power the connected economy.
The round was led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP), with participation from existing investors whose number include Cisco and Dell, creating opportunities to extend NS1’s market reach and magnify the company’s distribution channel.
NS1 said the most recent round of funding, which represents a significant increase in valuation for the company, would allow it to invest more aggressively in product innovation and expand its engineering capacity.
In the first quarter of 2020, new customer bookings were said to have grown by 159% year on year, and the company now serves more than 600 enterprise customers. NS1 said demand for its foundational technologies had accelerated as more organisations sought to modernise application and access networking stacks to address the continued pressure to support new approaches to work and customer engagement.
Although IT modernisation trends are well established, NS1 said recent events had highlighted the importance of high-performing resilient applications and the critical infrastructure technology that supports them. With legacy internet and networking solutions under strain during the Covid-19 pandemic, NS1 claimed its software-defined solutions provided the flexibility and scalability to keep its customers resilient and people connecting, streaming, innovating and moving the world forward.
“There is heightened urgency to expedite IT modernisation. Five-year projects are being condensed to one year, and the only way to deliver on these aggressive timelines is by unlocking leverage in foundational application and networking infrastructure,” said Kris Beevers, co-founder and CEO for NS1.
“There is heightened urgency to expedite IT modernisation. Five-year projects are being condensed to one year, and the only way to deliver on these aggressive timelines is by unlocking leverage in foundational application and networking infrastructure”
Kris Beevers, NS1
“This additional investment at a time of rapid growth at NS1 helps us capitalise on the market opportunity to meet escalating demand for the modern foundational technologies used by every business, enabling them to quickly adapt to changing environments, more effectively control costs, and deliver reliable, secure and exceptional user experiences.”
As part of the funding round, EIP partner Shawn Cherian will join NS1’s board of directors. Commenting on the funding, he said EIP’s investment in NS1 represented a growing appetite from the firm’s limited partners to integrate with category-leading companies and invest in enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
He cited NS1’s role in meeting connectivity requirements generated by the rapidly increasing number of connected devices as a primary area of growth. “As enterprises shift to the cloud and their environments become more complex, fundamental infrastructure solutions, like those provided by NS1, will play a critical role in allowing companies to expand more effectively,” he remarked.
“NS1 is the leading next-generation DNS platform and has defined the standard for performance, resilience and scale, which will continue to have broad applicability for internet services and solutions across verticals.”
