Meter: The internet's last mile
Turning networking into a utility.
It’s early Saturday morning on a tree-lined street just south of San Francisco. Early enough that the block is silent save for the faint beep of a delivery truck reversing into place.
The driver hops out, checks his iPad, and lifts the truck door. The pallet he unloads isn’t a West Elm couch, it’s enterprise-grade networking hardware—designed by the man waiting by the door.
Sunil Varanasi signs for the delivery. He thanks the driver but politely declines the offer to help open the crate. That’s part of the challenge.
Inside the garage, he starts the timer on his Apple Watch. He slices the straps, peels back the wrap, and slides open the casing. Forty-three seconds. He notes this in a small Leuchtturm notebook. Another twenty-four seconds to extract the first unit. Another note. The page fills with timestamps. If you found the notebook on the street, you’d think it belonged to an F1 pit crew.
Sunil works methodically, mounting one of the units onto a rack. One clean turn. Then another. The soft click of perfect torque.
“That’s why we changed the screws,” he tells me later. “The old ones needed both hands. Hold here, screw there. Took over two minutes. Now they twist and lock. No tools. Forty seconds.”
Anil, his brother and co-founder, looks up from his phone and grins. “Forty seconds? You’re getting slow, old man.”
“I’d like to get it to thirty-five,” Sunil replies.
When you’re dealing in bits and atoms, you want an atomic attention to detail.
The bet
Networking is the forgotten substrate of modern computing. It is also one of the most fragile. The big vendors are stitched together from decades of acquisitions. The hardware is bolted on and designed to be torn out. The software feels unloved. And the people who understand how the whole thing fits together are retiring with no real pipeline behind them.
Inside the industry, the reaction is a shrug. This is just how networking is. This is how it has always been. Meter is betting that this assumption is wrong.
The scale of the category is almost absurd once you look directly at it. Broadcom sits near two trillion. Nvidia earns a massive share of its revenue from networking. Fifteen to twenty percent of a data center’s capex and opex flows into networking and the labor around it. It is one of the largest markets in technology, hiding in plain sight because no one thinks to examine the plumbing.
When I asked Lachy Groom about it, he called Meter the clearest infrastructure bet of the cycle. Models and chips get the attention, but the deepest leverage sits in the layers that outlast hype waves, the layers that get harder, not easier, as demand grows. Networking is one of those layers.
Anil puts it more simply. You cannot build real AI without caring about the plumbing.
And that idea is about to be tested. Every headline points at the frontier labs. Every chart points at GPUs. But all of that activity depends on one thing: packets. A packet is the smallest unit of data on the internet. Every message, stream, query, training run, and inference step becomes thousands of packets racing across the world.
One of Anil’s core beliefs is that we will use the internet far more in the future than we do today. The internet runs on packets, and if you are the company that can best move those packets, the world begins to lean on you.
And the world is beginning to notice. Earlier this year, Microsoft formally partnered with Meter: investing in the company, supporting the training of Meter’s models on Microsoft infrastructure, and adding Meter as the only networking provider on the Microsoft Marketplace.
For decades, networking has been treated as a legacy category rather than a frontier one. The large vendors accepted complexity as destiny. The industry resembled the pre-Tesla car market. Sprawling supply chains. Heavy intermediaries. A belief that vertical integration was impossible.
Meter rejects that premise. You do not inherit the constraints of an industry. You redesign the whole thing. One stack. One interface. One control plane. If the system breaks, you fix the system. If it is too slow, you redesign the loop.
While the spotlight sits on OpenAI, Nvidia, and the model and chips race, the bulb itself depends on the wiring underneath. Meter is just outside the frame, powering the thing everyone is looking at.
This is the bet. That infrastructure, done properly, compounds harder than anything built on top of it. That the AI moment will force the world to see the plumbing it has ignored for twenty years. And that the company capable of owning the full loop will define the next era.
Meter believes networking should run like electricity. It just has not been built that way yet.
The brothers
If you were guessing the path two ambitious brothers would take toward building an internet infrastructure company, you would probably picture San Francisco. But Anil and Sunil Varanasi have never followed the obvious route. Their work has always come from a different instinct. When something is hard or opaque or fundamental, they don’t take it for granted, they take it apart and rebuild it better.
Shenzhen was the clearest expression of that instinct. They went there not for adventure but because they wanted to learn how hardware really gets made. Not from textbooks. From factories. They lived in a small apartment beside a school. Sunil slept in his bed. Anil often slept on the floor, his bed taken up by circuitry. Days were spent inside workshops. Evenings were split between basketball courts and technical manuals. Sunil, trained in biology and genetics, taught himself PCB design from library books. Four months later he was producing functional circuit boards from scratch.
They learned to solder. They learned how heat moves through components. They learned how hard it is to convince a factory to change a production line for a fifty unit order. When they first tried to get production contracts in Taiwan, almost every factory turned them away. Too small. Too early. Years later, the same factories were competing to win Meter’s business.
But the deepest reveal about the brothers came later, when San Francisco finally beckoned. One morning Sunil walked into the office carrying a document he had written overnight. More than a hundred pages. A complete rethinking of how the entire networking stack could work if you threw away the industry’s assumptions and started from physics. Anil compared it to Moses coming down the mountain. Except instead of commandments, Sunil had diagrams, topologies, and rules for a world that did not yet exist.
He placed the document on the table. Anil read it quietly, nodding along as he went through. Turning the final page, he said “Let’s do it.” And the company shifted around the document.
Alan Kay once said that people who are serious about software should make their own hardware. For the brothers, seriousness meant something even stricter. You go to the factories. You understand the physics. You master the whole stack. And you do not stop until the system does exactly what you intend.
The stack
The document Sunil placed on the table was a new physics for how a network could work. In the old world, hardware and software lived on different timelines. Devices arrived with their own quirks, constraints, and silent assumptions. Software bent around those quirks. Operators bent around both.
Meter started somewhere else entirely. If you were going to rebuild the system, you would vertically integrate it. Make the physical and the digital match perfectly. Reject the precedent to commoditize networking hardware and instead build beautiful hardware that fits with its precise software twin. Every configuration would live in the cloud, not on the box. A switch would reach the customer fully configured, waking up and behaving as an engineer intended. Logic would dictate hardware.
Once you build everything as a single unit, the whole system shifts. You can simulate a rollout before anyone unspools a cable. You can redesign a topology with the freedom of refactoring code. You can validate thousands of networks on your phone. You can build powerful models that automate network design, deployment, and management. A network stops looking like patchwork equipment and starts looking like a coherent fleet.
Meter is creating the Tesla moment for networking. The difference between coordinating a constellation of inherited parts and owning the entire loop. Tesla controls battery, motor, firmware, data, fleet operations. Similar for Meter: hardware, firmware, cloud, installation, operations, and now the model layer. One stack. One interface. One control plane. A universe they designed end-to-end. Intelligence is no longer an add-on, it is the next step.
The model is not just trained on dashboards or logs. It learns from the structure itself. Switch behavior. Wireless patterns. Routing logic. Power constraints. Physical layouts. Failure modes. The physics of how a real network breathes. Because the physical and digital match perfectly, the model can reason with the same fidelity as a human engineer, only without the limits of place or time.
Give it a floor plan and a few requirements and it produces the full design. Placement. Cabling. Switching. Wireless. Redundancy. All validated across thousands of simulations. Weeks fall into minutes. And as the available talent pool of network engineers declines, Meter’s uniquely positioned to step in and support them. The old world loses expertise while the new world gains leverage.
This is the moment where Meter’s strategy begins to feel inevitable. When the stack is unified and the network becomes knowable, it becomes something that can think.
You can also communicate with it. With Meter, you can DM your network. You type a message as you would to a colleague. The system understands. You tell it what you want. The network decides how to make it happen.
This is the model. The intelligence that follows naturally from rebuilding the world underneath it. This is why Meter can build what no incumbent can attempt.
The distribution
If you want to change an industry, you need a distribution engine that compounds faster than anyone else’s. For Meter, that engine came from observing how companies grow.
Startups sign years-long office leases that they outgrow in months. They expand, overflow, and move again. Each move forces them to rebuild their network from nothing. Hardware orders. Contractors. Cabling. For companies used to shipping daily, waiting weeks for internet plumbing feels obscene. And every time they leave, they have to rip out the network they just paid for.
Meter realized that if the hardware stays in the walls, the next tenant can use it on day one. No waiting. No rebuild. The departing customer takes Meter with them to their new space, and the incoming tenant inherits a working network, already shaped for the physics of that space. One installation now serves several users across time. Once Meter is in a building, demand starts to arrive on its own.
To make this work at scale, Meter needed buy-in from the landlords. The building itself had to become the channel. And once Meter is in the building, it’s there for good.
Girish Gopalan on Meter’s real estate team spent months visiting landlords, often with boxes of donuts, showing them what it means for a tenant to open the door to a new office and finding the network already alive. The pitch was simple. You have water. You have power. Now you have Meter. A third utility.
With Meter, the space rents faster. Tenants settle sooner. Brokers close deals more easily. Even if the tenant chooses another space, they return months later and ask for Meter in the one they finally select. Win a tenant and you meet their landlord. Many landlords own dozens of buildings. Some own entire portfolios. When a building changes hands, the new owner often reaches out first. They have heard that Meter removes uncertainty. They want it from day zero.
Clusters of installations also drive down labor costs, turning every new building into momentum for the next. As the footprint grows, so does the credibility. It becomes harder for anyone else to even enter the conversation. There are no real brands in networking. Ask someone who provides their connectivity and they will almost always shrug. The category is invisible.
And the part no incumbent can imitate is the part that makes the flywheel turn. None of them control hardware, firmware, installation, support, and operations in one continuous loop. Without vertical integration, you cannot ask landlords to standardize on you. Meter can.
Which is why the strategy begins to feel inevitable. Offices were the beginning, Meter now operates across industrial, retail, healthcare, education, and data centers. Meter wants to be the connectivity layer waiting inside every space before anyone signs a lease. The default because it is already there.
The flywheel
Meter discovered early that networking could be financed the same way you would finance a long-lived utility. A physical footprint that pays for itself many times over.
When Meter wins a customer, the customer isn’t just buying a network. They are helping Meter acquire the location itself. The hardware stays in the space long after the tenant leaves. The next tenant inherits it. One installation begins to serve two users, then three, then four. The cost of the original deployment spreads across every future occupant.
This is where traditional networking breaks. Most vendors treat hardware as an expense that has to be clawed back immediately. They don’t control enough of the value chain to earn from it twice. Meter does. Vertical integration makes the investment self-amortizing.
That self-amortization is what sets the flywheel in motion. Better integrated hardware enables better software. Better software creates more customer value. That value supports higher lifetime revenue per location, which is reinvested into tighter integration, faster installs, and the next generation of hardware. Each turn of the loop makes the system cheaper to operate, harder to replicate, and more valuable to every customer that follows.
The economics follow naturally. The recurring price covers hardware, firmware, software, installation, and support. Hardware is the minority of the cost. Labor is the majority. But labor collapses when you install multiple suites in the same building. A cluster of ten deployments can cut labor costs by nearly half. Meter only needs a small percentage of those suites to become paying customers for the numbers to work. The rest becomes upside.
This is why Meter treats buildings as part of the network. Once a location enters the footprint, it behaves like infrastructure. The cost to support it falls. The revenue compounds. A building becomes a long-lived asset in the same way a stretch of fiber or a piece of grid does. Something you invest in once and earn from repeatedly.
It also explains why Meter is comfortable with capital intensity. Most hardware companies avoid capex because they don’t own the loop. Meter owns every part of it. Hardware, firmware, cloud, installation, support. The capital they deploy today returns through tenants they haven’t even met yet.
This unlocks financing mechanisms most software companies never see. Equity for speed, venture debt for footprint, revenue-linked financing tied to buildings already under contract. Growth funded by the predictability of infrastructure, with less volatility than quarterly sales.
Most people still see boxes of hardware and a subscription price. Meter sees a footprint that compounds.
The team
Meter the company is built from two tribes. On one side are the networking veterans: people whose careers have been shaped by the physics of real systems. They speak in failure modes, tolerances, and thermal budgets. They know what happens to a switch when a room gets a few degrees too warm. They know the ghosts that live inside legacy networks and what’s required to keep them running.
On the other side are the software-natives who grew up in a world of SaaS. Designers, operators, and engineers who move quickly, improvize well, and have a natural instinct for turning something complex into something a customer can actually use.
Most companies would separate these groups, or let them operate on different tempos. At Meter, they sit a few feet apart. They work with the same temperament: a calm intensity, a grounded focus, a sense that the work matters but panic does not. The networking folks bring the why. The builders bring the why not. Together, they give the company shape.
Lachy Groom calls Anil a “generational recruiter.” It shows. The team Meter has assembled shouldn’t exist at this scale, in this industry, at this moment. A group that moves like a single unit, despite coming from opposite ends of the universe.
Directly across the street from the office sits Meter’s distribution center. Not an outsourced warehouse an hour outside the city. Not a black box. Across the road. You can watch hardware move from design to assembly to deployment in one continuous loop. Few companies get to see their product cross the street in real time.
The clock
But none of this guarantees anything. Meter thinks in decades, but the opening to define the next era of networking is much shorter. As Anil puts it, the next thousand days will decide who becomes the default provider. The window is wide today, but it will close.
Meeting that moment means stepping out of the quiet that protected them for so long. Almost no one knows the Meter name. At first that was intentional, then a byproduct of focus. Now it is a liability. The company rebuilding the networking layer of the internet finally has to tell the world what it has built.
But telling the world is not foreign territory. Before Meter, the brothers ran a small film studio as a side project. Anil in particular has a habit of spotting creative talent early: he backed Dwarkesh Patel when his podcast had only a few hundred listeners. These are small signals, but they point to something important. Meter understands taste. They understand narrative. They understand the outside world as well as the inside one.
The next thousand days are the test. A unified architecture. A unified model. A unified team. And now, finally, a unified story.
The company is built like its product. And the clock is running.
The end
It’s Friday late-afternoon, and I’m in a conference room with Anil and Sunil. Sunil is at the whiteboard in his usual stance, sketching packet paths at speed. At first the lines look chaotic. Then, with a few final strokes, everything snaps into place. You get the sense the whole system is sitting behind his eyes, waiting to be drawn.
Across the table, Anil watches in his familiar way. Quiet. Focused. Letting the explanation run until one sentence from him lands in the exact spot that makes the whole diagram click. Their rhythm is easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. One builds the world. The other orients you inside it.
We’ve gone past our allotted time, but Sunil is still drawing. He’s onto installation now, talking through how it used to require two hands, then one, and how every small improvement frees a technician somewhere in the real world. Now that I’ve seen how Meter’s model works in the macro, this part makes perfect sense: the big shifts come from a thousand tiny adjustments.
I mention something Anil told me earlier, about wanting Meter to feel like it was designed by one person. I say that it already does, and that person is Sunil.
Anil smiles. “That’s right.”
Sunil caps the marker and apologizes for having to run. They’re launching nine new hardware models, and one of them has just arrived across the road.
As he ducks out, Anil calls after him, “Two hands last year, one hand this year, it better be hands-free next year!”
The thousand-day clock is already running. And, somewhere on a tree-lined street just south of San Francisco, another pallet is being opened — a little faster than the one before.
Thanks to Anil, Sunil, Sarah, Liam, Lachy, Nitan, Girish, Pike, James, and everyone else who took the time to help with this piece.