Alkira ready for growth cycle with $100M in funding

NaaS startup Alkira brought in $100 million in Series C funding this week. Launched in 2018, the network infrastructure-as-a-service company's total funding now amounts to $176 million.

In 2020 Alkira received $54 million in its Series B funding round, an amount the company was cautious about spending due to fluctuating market conditions at the time, Atif Khan, co-founder of Alkira, told Light Reading. Khan said the company plans to utilize this latest funding round to support go-to-market initiatives such as marketing and sales pushes.

"Over the last few years, we've doubled our ARR (annual recurring revenue) and the number of customers," said Khan. "With this raise, it gives us the flexibility to take the next step to scale the company in all aspects."

Alkira's third funding round was led by Tiger Global Management, a global investment firm, with additional investment from Dallas Venture Capital, Geodesic Capital and NextEquity Partners. It included participation from existing investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Koch Disruptive Technologies and Sequoia Capital. Koch Disruptive Technologies is part of the investment division of Koch Industries, a long-time customer of Alkira.

Expanding in Europe

Alkira also plans to grow its workforce and expand its global IP backbone which includes a collection of virtual points of presence (PoPs) that connect on-premise networks to the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure clouds.

Related:Will Alkira's CBaaS shine in a sea of SASE suppliers?

While Alkira has been more focused on US-based customers, Khan said the company will focus more attention on expanding in Europe. Alkira's primary customer focus is the enterprise, such as financial firms and pharmaceutical companies, but it also works with communications service providers as channel partners.

Alkira got its start in multicloud networking and has expanded to what it calls "network infrastructure as-a-service," which is similar to network-as-a-service (NaaS). But while NaaS is typically a managed service, Alkira's approach is to provide customers with the security, SD-WAN and networking infrastructure to manage on their own.  

"Our customers are able to use our networking infrastructure, available globally, and build their network on top of it," explained Khan.

Alkira integrates with networking and security vendors such as Palo Alto, Fortinet, Check Point and Cisco.

This year, worldwide end user spending on public cloud services is forecast to reach $679 billion, and surpass $1 trillion in 2027, according to Gartner.