NEEDHAM, MA / ACCESS Newswire / September 23, 2026 / Silk, the purpose-built data platform for agentic AI workloads, today announced it has closed a $45 million growth capital facility led by Avenue Capital Group with participation from Sequoia Capital, S Capital VC, Vintage Investment Partners, Ibex Investors, West Coast Equity Partners and others. Silk will use the proceeds to expand engineering investment in its data platform, scale go-to-market coverage of neocloud, sovereign and inference cloud providers, and deepen its enterprise footprint across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
"The shift from training-centric infrastructure toward autonomous agent-based production is happening now," said Dani Golan, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Silk. "Organizations are spending enormous sums on compute only to wait on the data layer beneath it. This capital lets us build ahead of agentic demand and bring AI to the data."
Agent-driven workloads are now the dominant source of AI infrastructure demand, and the shift is measurable. More than half of all traffic across Cloudflare's global network is generated by machines rather than humans, and daily AI agent requests grew more than 1,700% year over year. Agents operate at machine pace producing bursty access patterns that general-purpose cloud data infrastructure was never designed to absorb. The result is unpredictable latency, contention between agents and production users, and cost curves that break at this scale. The requirement of agents operating against live data is driving clouds beyond selling GPU capacity into higher-value enterprise AI service.
"We underwrote Silk's recurring enterprise revenue base and its position in a market that is inflecting right now," said Tony Pandjiris, Senior Portfolio Manager of Avenue Capital Group's Growth Lending Strategy. "Agentic AI is moving from pilot to production across the enterprise, and the data layer is the bottleneck that has yet to be solved. Silk's traction with global enterprise customers and cloud providers, and the measurable economics the platform delivers, are what gave us conviction."
The financing follows a period of sustained commercial expansion for Silk, including validated support for the latest AI-optimized cloud instance families and the appointment of Aaron Shoffa as Chief Business Development Officer to lead the company's alliances with neocloud, sovereign and inference cloud providers.
"The neocloud, sovereign and inference clouds are the new center of gravity for AI infrastructure, and the need to absorb agent-driven, real-time data requests is here now," added Golan. "Avenue understands infrastructure businesses at this stage, and they move at the speed and clarity this market demands. This gives us the balance sheet to extend our first-mover advantage while the category is forming."
About Silk
Silk is the purpose-built data platform for agentic AI. General-purpose cloud infrastructure wasn't designed for today's business-critical AI workloads: the real-time demands, the data velocity, the elasticity requirements. Silk was. By eliminating the resource constraints and complexity that hold other data platforms back, Silk enables customers to run AI workloads with up to 10x performance improvement and up to 69% lower cloud cost, with no application rearchitecting required. When data powers everything, the platform beneath it must be without compromise.
Learn more at www.silk.ai.
About Avenue Capital Group
The Avenue Capital Group's Growth Lending Strategy seeks to provide creative financing solutions to high-growth, venture capital-backed technology and life sciences companies. The strategy generally focuses on the opportunity created by the widening financing gap between commercial banks and larger debt funds, providing flexible capital to high-growth companies as they scale. The Growth Lending Strategy is part of the larger group of funds of Avenue Capital Group, which is a global investment firm with assets under management of more than $9 billion.
Learn more at www.avenuecapital.com.
Silk Media Contact
Tom Murphy
+1 781-603-6179
tom.murphy@silk.ai
Avenue Capital Group Media Contact
Todd Fogarty | Kekst CNC
todd.fogarty@kekstcnc.com
Sources: Cloudflare, "Machines now generate the majority of traffic on Cloudflare's network," June 5, 2026 (share of automated traffic). Cloudflare, Q2 2026 reporting, August 6, 2026 (year-over-year growth in daily AI agent requests). Silk performance and cost figures reflect customer production deployments; ranges are "up to" and vary by workload.
Forward-looking statements: This release contains forward-looking statements regarding Silk's business plans, market opportunity and use of proceeds, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.
# # #
SOURCE: Silk
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire