2026-05-12
VD Kartik Srinivasan
"For any solution to take off and become successful, three things need to align, a real customer problem, a differentiated solution to that problem, and the right timing in terms of technology adoption."
For those who are not familiar with Napatech, could you briefly describe the company, your technology and the role you play in today’s networking and data center infrastructure?
Napatech is a high-performance networking company focused on moving data efficiently and securely inside the data center.
Our core purpose is data transport at scale, across mission-critical applications such as cybersecurity, packet monitoring, telecom, and fintech—what we call Core Infrastructure.
We also address AI Infrastructure, where we enable low-latency, scale-out networking for inference workloads.
Across both, our role is consistent: efficient, secure movement of data inside the data center.
You recently wrapped up a strong 2025, what are the most important strategic steps you are bringing with you into 2026, and where do you see the company standing strongest right now?
We have gone through a very disciplined exercise of prioritising what 2026 looks like. The first priority is to convert as much of our pipeline as possible into revenue. We have invested significantly in our own organic roadmap and in enabling our customers through the design-win process, and our focus now is on translating those design wins into production revenue.
The second priority is focused execution, picking the projects and customers with maximum ROI. The third is financial rigour, identifying the highest-margin solutions without having to compromise on performance.
Where we stand strongest right now is in our differentiated feature set, which is programmable networking. The data center market is evolving so fast that solutions from even two or three years ago are no longer enough from a performance and efficiency standpoint. Being a programmable networking provider allows us to deliver to customer requirements faster and with significantly more agility than our competitors.
Earlier this year you completed a capital raise, how are you thinking about your priorities going forward and what does it enable for your business?
The most obvious thing the capital raise gave us was runway, but that was not the only benefit. It also allowed us to operate with a higher level of focus and speed.
In terms of how we deploy the capital, scaling our AI infrastructure investments and converting design wins into revenue is the clear focus. We are concentrating on programs with nearer-term revenue potential and on maximising repeatable offerings rather than one-off custom designs.
That combination, near-term revenue conversion and scalable, repeatable products, is where we are directing most of our efforts going forward.
The AI wave is driving massive investments in data centers, how are you positioning yourselves in this development, and what makes customers choose Napatech’s solutions over others?
The AI data center is transitioning from a compute problem to an efficiency challenge, and a meaningful part of that efficiency challenge sits in the network. Given that Napatech’s entire identity is efficient networking, we are positioned very ideally in the current AI infrastructure expansion.
Our solution makes the compute engine more efficient and more performant, whether the underlying compute is a GPU, an ASIC or a TPU. That is exactly what AI customers are looking for today.
Why do customers choose us? Primarily because we offer a programmable architecture, which gives a faster time to solution. We deliver hardware performance at software feature velocity, deterministic performance through robust FPGA-based hardware and line-rate programmability. In practical terms, that allows customers to maximise both performance and efficiency without compromising on time to solution.
Over the past year you have both expanded the ecosystem through new partnerships and added a long list of design wins, could you describe what a typical customer journey looks like, from the first dialogue to the solution being rolled out at scale?
Internally we have built a framework that puts the customer journey into a four-stage design pipeline. It starts in qualification, moves into development, then into a design-win stage, and finally into production.
Depending on the complexity of the requirement set, the full journey typically takes between 9 and 18 months, and in some cases it can be slightly longer. On the shorter end, we can convert a customer from the first meeting into production revenue in around nine months, while on the longer end it can be 18 to 20 months.
This structured pipeline is also where we focus internally, to make sure customers move through the stages with as little friction as possible and that we can scale the solution efficiently when it reaches production.
Where do you see Napatech one year from now?
We are in a tranformation period right now, so the easiest way to visualise where we will be a year from now is to think about Napatech’s identity in the AI infrastructure world. We will be a networking solution provider for AI infrastructure, with the highest level of performance and efficiency.
In 2025 we delivered around USD 23 million in revenue, and our guidance for this year is USD 32 to 38 million, which already represents a growth rate of more than 50 percent. The majority of that business is coming from core infrastructure today, with a smaller contribution from AI infrastructure, but AI infrastructure is the area we expect to grow into in the years ahead.
Finally, could you give three reasons why Napatech is an interesting company to follow today?
For any solution to take off and become successful, three things need to align, a real customer problem, a differentiated solution to that problem, and the right timing in terms of technology adoption.
The first reason to look at Napatech now is that the customer problem is more real than ever before. Data center efficiency is a well-understood challenge, and networking has been identified as one of the key bottlenecks.
The second reason is that our solution is a genuine and ideal fit for that problem, both in terms of architecture and performance.
The third reason is timing. The killer application leveraging all of the underlying infrastructure today is AI, which is raising the tide for the entire ecosystem. The combination of a clear customer need, a differentiated value proposition, and AI as the driver of adoption is exactly why Napatech is interesting to start following right now.
