{"id":6588,"date":"2026-03-09T16:30:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T16:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nexthop.ai\/staging\/?p=6588"},"modified":"2026-06-10T03:52:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T03:52:05","slug":"journey-of-a-new-company-embracing-sonic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nexthop.ai\/staging\/journey-of-a-new-company-embracing-sonic\/","title":{"rendered":"Journey of a new company built for SONiC"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What happens when engineers with decades of experience in building network operating system (NOS) software embrace the open-source culture of SONiC\u00ae<\/a>?\u00a0 The result is accelerated innovation and a win-win for our customers.\u00a0 Following up on our introduction to the SONiC community<\/a> 6 months ago, I\u2019d like to provide an update on Nexthop AI\u2019s journey to translate deep NOS expertise into immediate, high-impact contributions.<\/p>\n\n

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The Nexthop AI team at the SONiC India Workshop in September 2025, held at the Microsoft India Development Center (IDC) in Hyderabad. The author, Ryan, is pictured on the far right.
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To recap our progress, Nexthop AI was started in\u00a0 2024 by our Founder & CEO, Anshul Sadana.\u00a0 We have hardware and software teams that design network switches, and we write software to enable that hardware to be deployed at hyperscalers.\u00a0 On the software side, many of us have dedicated our careers to building software on NOSes. Our backgrounds span everything from BIOS to drivers, routing protocol stacks, configuration, telemetry, network management and test infrastructure. At Nexthop, we work on open NOSes such as SONiC as our starting point.<\/p>\n\n
We continue to apply our years and decades of experience with foundational network concepts, but the structure of our software engineering is distinct from working on proprietary NOSes.\u00a0 We still conduct internal maintenance meetings\u2013 discussing code evolution, reviewing test pass rates, tracking bugs, and monitoring project progress\u2013 all of which have equivalents in the community. Instead of doing all of this in-house, our work requires active participation in open-source Community Workgroup Meetings and Issues Meetings, where topics impacting various participating companies are discussed every week.\u00a0 As a consequence, our team discussions are no longer limited to co-workers, but routinely include chip vendors, operators, and other system vendors.<\/p>\n\n
We not only build infrastructure for AI, we are equally passionate about using AI technologies for coding, testing, and workflow automation. Over the past six months, our team has achieved significant progress, actively integrating the latest advancements in AI coding assistants, toolchains, and agents. Unlike many other companies and software systems that are over a decade or two in existence, we have had the opportunity to start fresh with an AI-first approach and adopt a development toolchain that is primarily AI-native.\u00a0 Working within the open-source community provides a distinct advantage: our AI tools can leverage both our direct contributions and the extensive context available from all open-source code on GitHub. Furthermore, our third-party systems are designed with rich connectors, allowing them to seamlessly access and utilize context across all our different internal tools.<\/p>\n\n
Combining our team\u2019s experience and expertise, with SONiC as a foundational part of our software, I\u2019m excited about some recent milestones:<\/p>\n\n