Affirmed Networks, Inc.

Affirmed Networks, Inc. is a venture-backed telecommunications software company founded in 2010 and headquartered in Acton, Massachusetts (later Burlington, MA). Microsoft announced its acquisition in March 2020 and completed it in April 2020; press reports valued the deal at roughly $1.35 billion. Affirmed is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, folded into Microsoft's Azure for Operators business. It raised about $155–240 million pre-acquisition from investors including Matrix Partners, Bessemer, CRV, Qualcomm Ventures, and Centerview. Public sources put its headcount at roughly 480–550 employees at the time of acquisition.

Products/operations. Affirmed builds virtualized, cloud-native mobile core software for telecom operators. Its main product lines were the Virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), the UnityCloud 5G standalone core, UnityCloud Operations (orchestration/management), IoT mobile core solutions (LTE-M, NB-IoT, SCEF), virtualized Wi-Fi gateways (TWAG/ePDG), virtual probe and analytics, network slicing, and GiLAN content/security services. Reported customers included AT&T, Vodafone, SoftBank, Orange, Telus, Turkcell, and Etisalat; Microsoft integrated the technology into Azure Operator Nexus for running 4G/5G core workloads in the cloud.

Patent-litigation posture. Affirmed is an operating company, not an NPE. Its two tracked appearances both stem from a single dispute with Lemko Corporation: Affirmed appears as a co-defendant with parent Microsoft (Lemko Corporation v. Microsoft Corporation et al., N.D. Tex., Dallas Division, filed February 2022) and as a co-petitioner with Microsoft in an inter partes review at the PTAB (Microsoft Corporation et al. v. Lemko Corporation, filed February 2023). The venue is the Northern District of Texas, not the Eastern District.

Notable context. Lemko sued Microsoft and Affirmed alleging infringement of its distributed mobile architecture patents covering virtualized/edge mobile networking — technology closely overlapping Affirmed's own NFV core products. Microsoft and Affirmed petitioned for IPR of several Lemko patents (e.g., IPR2023-00529, IPR2023-00531); the PTAB found the challenged claims not unpatentable, Lemko appealed, and the Federal Circuit affirmed in April 2026. In district court, Lemko's contributory infringement claims were dismissed with prejudice in June 2025, while its direct and indirect infringement claims survived dismissal.