Who Owns Arista Networks?

Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Kenneth Duda founded the company in 2004 in Santa Clara, initially called Arastra. Bechtolsheim had co-founded Sun Microsystems and Granite Systems; Cheriton was a Stanford professor with multiple successful systems startups. Their thesis attacked the incumbents directly: networking software was a proprietary mess, and a single modern operating system could win.

The product was EOS, the Extensible Operating System, a Linux-based network OS designed as a state-sharing architecture where every feature ran on a publish-subscribe database rather than bolted-on modules. Arista paired it with merchant silicon, high-performance chips from Broadcom and later others, instead of custom ASICs, shipping faster and cheaper.

Cloud titans became anchor customers. Microsoft and later Meta adopted Arista for data center spine networks, giving the young company credibility against Cisco. The June 2014 NYSE IPO cemented its position as the challenger brand.

The 2010s expanded the line: 7500 and 7800 spine platforms, campus switches, routing products through the Mojo and Big Switch acquisitions, and CloudVision for network-wide automation. Lawsuits from Cisco over EOS features produced a public legal battle that ended largely in Arista's favor by 2018.

The AI supercycle made Arista a centerpiece. Its Ethernet-based Etherlink architectures and the 7800 AI Spine became the networking standard for GPU clusters positioned against Nvidia's InfiniBand. Q3 2026 produced $3.66 billion in revenue, up 58.5%, the fastest growth since the IPO, and in September 2026 Arista joined the S&P 100.