Embrane

About Embrane

Founded in 2009 by former Cisco engineers Dante Malagrino and Marco Di Benedetto, Embrane established itself as a provider of application-centric network services for enterprise and service provider data centers. Malagrino, who served as President & CEO, and Di Benedetto, the CTO, both leveraged their prior experience at Cisco, particularly in developing core infrastructure for its NX-OS operating system, to address the growing need for agility and automation in virtualized environments. The company's vision was to empower network teams with the same level of on-demand capability that system administrators had achieved with virtual machines.

Embrane's core business centered on a software platform that delivered lifecycle management for virtual network services. Its product portfolio included software-defined firewalls, VPNs, server load balancers, and SSL offload engines. The platform, built on a distributed software architecture called "helios," allowed for the automated deployment and scaling of these services in seconds, a significant improvement over traditional hardware-based systems. This catered to customers in private, public, and hybrid cloud environments who were struggling with the slow, manual processes of provisioning network infrastructure for new applications.

The company's business model focused on providing a flexible, consumption-based approach. For enterprises, this meant a reduction in capital and operational expenditures by paying only for the required network services. For service providers, it enabled a more profitable model where they could offer and monetize dedicated, guaranteed services with defined service-level agreements (SLAs) for their customers. Embrane raised a total of $41 million over three funding rounds, with notable investors including New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and an early strategic investment from Cisco. The final Series C round in March 2014 was led by Cisco. This series of investments culminated in Cisco announcing its intent to acquire Embrane in April 2015 for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was a strategic move to bolster Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Nexus product portfolio, integrating Embrane's team and technology into its Insieme Business Unit to accelerate virtualization and automation capabilities.