Barefoot Networks, founded by Stanford professor Nick McKeown, plans to sell networking chips, discloses a $57M funding round led by Google and Goldman Sachs
Don Clark / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2016, Nick McKeown's Barefoot Networks turned its Stanford-rooted programmable chip research into a product plan, disclosing a [[a:|—]] $57 million round led by Google and Goldman Sachs — an unusual pairing of a hyperscaler that would run such silicon and a bank that would finance it. The round was a bet on merchant networking chips replacing fixed-function switch ASICs inside data centers.
The arc that followed validated the thesis and absorbed the company: by 2019 Barefoot had raised roughly $155M total from Tencent, Alibaba, and HPE before Intel acquired the company outright, and CEO Craig Barratt exited Intel just a year after the deal closed, per his departure from Intel's connectivity group. The category Barefoot opened has since drawn fresh rounds like Enfabrica's $115M Series C for accelerated compute fabric.
First-order effects
- Google gains a seat at the table on the switch silicon that routes its own traffic, while Barefoot gets a reference customer plus Wall Street financing to move from research into shipping chips against incumbents selling fixed-function ASICs.
Second-order effects
- Strategic investors pile in around the same thesis — Tencent, Alibaba, and HPE all join the cap table over the following years — turning programmable networking silicon into a multi-cloud procurement question rather than a startup niche.
- Incumbent chipmakers face build-versus-buy pressure on programmable switching; Intel answers by acquiring Barefoot outright rather than competing against it, converting the independent merchant vendor into an internal product line.
Third-order effects
- Networking silicon consolidates into the hands of large platform owners — the founder leaves within a year of the acquirer absorbing the company, a pattern where startups prove out workload-specific designs and exit before scaling alone, a cycle later startups like Enfabrica restart with fresh capital.
The trend: Data-center networking is shifting from fixed-function switch ASICs toward programmable, workload-specific silicon funded by hyperscalers and ultimately consolidated by incumbent chipmakers.