Following 139% year-over-year growth, Forward Networks closed $50M in series D funding. The round was led by MSD Partners with support from new investors, Section 32, and Omega Venture Partners. Demonstrating ongoing support, existing investors Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs), Threshold Ventures, A. Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz participated in the round.
Since its last round of funding in 2019, Forward Networks has quadrupled its customer base, opened new headquarters in Santa Clara, California, and extended its development team with an office in Bangalore, India. In recent years, the platform has expanded to support SecOps and Cloud operations in addition to NetOps. Forward supports the major hardware vendors and cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
Commenting on the announcement, Victor Hwang, managing director and co-head of MSD Growth said, “We are exceedingly excited and optimistic about Forward Networks. As enterprise network architectures grow and become more complex, the necessity for network security and visibility have dramatically increased. Forward’s robust and scalable platform addresses this large and growing market need unlike anything else we’ve seen. As a flexible, long-term partner, MSD Growth seeks to back exceptional growth businesses with proven unit economics and strong commercial acceptance of their products. We’re thrilled to lead the company’s round of funding and support its next stage of growth.” Hwang joins the Forward Networks board of directors as part of the agreement.