30% Of Network Engineers Are Retiring. What Happens Next? (Anil Varanasi, Co-Founder & CEO of Meter)
Anil Varanasi, co-founder and CEO of Meter, is building a new kind of networking company for the AI era. Alongside his brother Sunil, he has helped raise more than $250 million to challenge incumbents like Cisco with a vertically integrated approach spanning hardware, software, deployment, and ongoing operations, all delivered through a utility-style model. His view is that networking has remained largely unchanged for decades, even as it has become foundational to everything from AI workloads to real-world infrastructure. Meter’s ambition is not just to improve existing networks, but to make them autonomous over time.
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- Uploaded May 26, 2026
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Speaker A: If you have a manufacturing facility, you need internet, networking, Wi-Fi, cellular to do whatever you want to do in that manufacturing facility. Traditionally, you have to go figure out what hardware you're going to use, who's going to install it, who's going to maintain it, where's the capital going to come from. With Meter, all customers have to do is give us a bunch of addresses and floor plans and somehow magically networks appear anywhere in the world. If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what is an experiment you would like to I think it would be interesting not to have school the first 15 years of your life.
I'm not sure if education works today. So much time, energy, and capital is going into augmenting software engineers. You and I could name hundreds of companies trying to do this. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: After software engineers, the second highest number of jobs in technology is network engineers. But something like 30% of all network engineers are retiring by the end of this decade without replacement. Speaker B: Yes. Speaker A: Networking is really important. Nobody else is studying this at all and everything in the world is packets, autonomous networks is like the only way to solve this.
Speaker C: Before Anil Varanasi built startups, he made films. Speaker B: He and his brother Sunil had a crew, designed theater sets, and built their own visual effects plugins. Today, the two of them run Meteor, a full-stack networking company that's raised more than $350 million to go head-to-head with giants like Cisco. Speaker C: In time, Meteor intends to build what Anil describes as fully autonomous networks designed for the AI era. Speaker C: In time, Meteor intends to build what Anil describes as fully autonomous networks designed for the AI era. Speaker B: In our conversation, Anil and I discuss his unusual upbringing in Virginia, Japanese vending machines, and what he means when he says that hardware should feel like a cathedral.
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