Alkira connects with $100M for a solution that connects your clouds
Summary
Its customers come from a range of verticals like industry (Koch is a strategic investor in the firm), financial services (S&P) and media (Warner Music), and the company has raised $176 million to date.Alkira is addressing one of the thornier aspects of the cloud revolution. Customers typically adopt a hybrid approach to cloud networking to hedge their bets, get the most competitive pricing by region, and lean into flexible arrangements, using multiple vendors, and in many cases, running private, public and on-premises servers in tandem depending on their needs.The problem with that, though, is that buying, implementing and managing that plate of spaghetti can prove to be an indigestible nightmare. The two have years of experience working in the world of telecoms a wonderful training ground, it turns out, for the incredible fragmentation of todays cloud computing landscape. )They previously founded another startup that was closer to that legacy networking space: Viptela, which specializes in software-defined wide area networking, and was acquired by Cisco for $610 million in 2017.This new turn into cloud computing puts Alkira up against a completely different wave of would-be competitors, though the very biggest players, like AWS, Azure and Google, are yet to make significant progress in working together. We believe Alkira is well-positioned to unlock the growing potential of this rapidly evolving space with its visionary approach, market traction and cutting-edge technology.