Drew Perkins has been inventing computer network tech and building startups since the dawn of the internet age.
Now he’s back as a co-founder and CEO of AI networking startup Eridu that’s officially coming out of stealth on Tuesday with an oversubscribed $200 million Series A round. The round was led by Socratic Partners, renowned VC John Doerr, Matter Venture Partners, and others. Eridu has now raised a total of $230 million, the company said.
Perkins began his career in the 1980s, and helped create the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) that became a key part of TCP/IP, the protocol upon which the internet relies. In 1999, the optical switch company he co-founded, Lightera Networks, was sold to Ciena for over $500 million. Next was Infinera, which IPO’d and was later sold to Nokia for $2.3 billion in 2025. He also co-founded Gainspeed (also sold to Nokia) and, most recently, the AR startup Mojo Vision.
But after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Perkins had an epiphany. In February 2023, Perkins and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were speaking at a small conference. They got to chatting, and “Sam told me that what enabled AI and ChatGPT was just enormous amounts of compute. At which time, I think he meant 4,000 GPUs, but now we’re talking about millions of GPUs,” Perkins told TechCrunch.
He realized from that conversation that the bottleneck to progress won’t just be access to more chips; it will be the methods the chips use to communicate with one another across their systems.
“What we needed to do in the networking sector, in the networking industry, was come up with a brand-new way of thinking about how you build networks and build network equipment, network chips, and the entire thing.”
By late 2023, Perkins had met his co-founder, Omar Hassen, whose roots are in networking chip design for the big industry players like Broadcom and Marvell. In 2024, they founded Eridu.
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