Eridu just raised over $200 million in Series A funding—an unusually large round that signals serious investor conviction that AI’s explosive growth has created a fundamental infrastructure crisis. The networking startup, led by serial entrepreneur Drew Perkins, emerged from stealth with backing from legendary investor John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins to tackle what the company calls the “network wall” throttling AI data centers.

The funding round’s size reflects both the capital intensity of hardware development and recognition that current data center networking wasn’t designed for AI’s massive communication demands. As training clusters scale to thousands of GPUs and models grow larger, the networks connecting them have become critical bottlenecks that billions in AI infrastructure investment can’t solve with software alone.

Navier raised $5.6 million in seed funding from GV, HCVC, and Y Combinator to commercialize Agent-Driven Engineering (ADE), a platform that coordinates hardware design workflows through autonomous engineering teams built on computer vision and spatial reasoning.

The San Francisco-based startup positions ADE as the third major productivity shift in engineering after Computer-Aided Design replaced manual drafting in the 1960s and simulation software enabled virtual testing in the 1990s. Where previous advances automated individual tasks, Navier targets the coordination bottleneck between design and engineering disciplines that still consumes significant engineering time despite decades of tooling advances.