In 2024, global data center capital expenditure rose 51% to $455 billion, according to Dell’Oro Group. That surge is largely driven by the buildout of AI-native infrastructure (See OpenAI’s Stargate, xAI’s Colossus), which meant a shift in compute power, along with how networks themselves are designed, deployed, and maintained. For many of the companies that are part of that shift, including hyperscaler CoreWeave, a key enabler has been NetBox Labs.
Founded as a commercial steward of the open-source NetBox project, NetBox Labs develops a platform for network infrastructure management, essentially replacing the spreadsheets and manual processes that many organizations still rely on. This week, the company just announced a $35 million Series B led by NGP Capital, bringing its total funding to $55 million since it spun out of DNS provider NS1 in early 2023.
NetBox aims to act as the authoritative source of truth for network infrastructure. The product models how infrastructure components are connected: from an IP address on an interface to that interface’s location on a rack-mounted switch. That structured data model powers a range of additional tools, including NetBox Discovery, which continuously scans and updates infrastructure records, and NetBox Assurance, which flags when deployed infrastructure drifts from intended configurations.
For customers like CoreWeave, which is building dozens of AI data centers a year, that kind of automation is directly tied to revenue. “NetBox is crucial for accelerating our timelines with automation,” said CoreWeave’s head of network, Jim Julson. “Deploying our infrastructure even a month sooner… directly impacts our revenue.”
From Documentation to Automation
NetBox began as an open-source documentation tool, but the commercial company has steadily extended its capabilities into operations, compliance, and AI-driven infrastructure management. In April, NetBox Assurance became generally available, adding configuration validation and drift detection: capabilities that CEO Kris Beevers says are becoming “essential for security and operational excellence.”
Roughly 40% of new customers are now purchasing the Assurance module, according to Beevers. The company has also developed the NetBox Operator, a tool that enables infrastructure teams to interact with NetBox via LLMs. The goal is to move toward agentic infrastructure management, where AI tools can reason about relationships between infrastructure components and execute changes without human intervention.
Those capabilities are grounded in NetBox’s data model, which provides LLMs with the contextual relationships needed to act intelligently. “Without it, you’re just throwing a bunch of raw data at a model that doesn’t know how to think about the connections between elements of your infrastructure,” Beevers told Network World.
Growth Mirroring AI Infrastructure Demands
NetBox’s relevance has grown alongside the infrastructure demands of AI. The platform is now used by thousands of companies, including several dozen Fortune 500 firms, financial institutions, and government agencies. Adoption of the open-source version has surpassed hundreds of thousands of installations, giving NetBox Labs a broad footprint to commercialize.
As organizations shift to infrastructure-as-code models and attempt to scale networks to support GPU clusters and AI workloads, centralized control and automation become imperative.
That has positioned NetBox Labs as a key layer in the evolving enterprise infrastructure stack. Its platform supports environments across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid models. NetBox Cloud, the company’s commercial SaaS version, provides APIs for tasks like IP address management, device provisioning, and update monitoring.
Beevers conveys NetBox’s mission as addressing five core infrastructure domains: infrastructure, operations, observability, automation, and security. In the near term, NetBox Labs is investing in additional AI-powered features, including security analytics and observability tools, to deepen its presence across those domains.
The company has quadrupled its staff in the past two years and plans to continue hiring across engineering, sales, and product functions. Investors, including Salesforce Ventures, Two Sigma, and IBM, are betting that the company can become a foundational provider in network operations, and observability.
