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Alkira has raised a total of $176 million to date
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The company plans to roll out a range of new multi-cloud networking and WAN features using the $100 million it just secured
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CTO Atif Khan elaborated on its roadmap as well as the role of AI in the MCN market
There’s a saying that goes something like “you have to have money to make money.” If that’s true, it’s good news for multi-cloud networking company Alkira, which just bagged $100 million in fresh funding. That brings its total raised to date to $176 million.
Atif Khan, Alkira co-founder and CTO, told Fierce via email the company has doubled both revenue and new customers over the past two years, drawing interest from enterprises in verticals including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, technology, media and more. Within the first year of use, many new customers who tap Alkira for one use case often end up adopting its platform for others as well.
So, safe to say “we expect this latest investment to help us double our revenues again in the next 12 months,” Khan said.
Gartner has forecast worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow from $679 billion in 2024 to more than $1 trillion in 2027. And IDC expects the multi-cloud networking market to be worth nearly $3.11 billion by 2027, compared to $830 million in 2024.
Alkira is competing with the likes of Aviatrix, VMware, Cisco, Arrcus and Prosimo as well as multi-cloud networking newcomers like Cloudflare, Equinix and Verizon.
But what exactly does Alkira plan to do with its new war chest to secure its position? According to Khan, the company plans to do a lot.
Alkira's plans include expanding its global network backbone, adding a wider range of its own and third-party services to its network services marketplace, delivering comprehensive network functionality for its Extranet-as-a-Service offering, and providing Zero Trust Network Access capabilities for customers, the CTO said. .
Oh, and it’s also going to be rolling out specialized network connectivity options designed to support AI workloads in hybrid and multi-cloud environments as well as AIOps tools for configuration, alerts, logs, and anomaly detection to simplify network management and troubleshooting. Whew!
Augmenting with AI
Did those last two catch your attention? That's good, because the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has a lot to do with the projects Alkira is focused on.
As Khan explained: “As apps and AI workloads move to the cloud, network traffic patterns are changing. This is creating a surge in demand for high-bandwidth connections within cloud infrastructures.
"Our vision is to deliver a secure and cost-efficient on-demand network that is adapted to these new patterns, so organizations can easily move the data loads around.”
When it comes to how Alkira is implementing AI, Khan said it wants to deliver “networking for AI” – that is, an elastic, on-demand network that can adapt to AI loads – as well as AI for networking – aka those AIOps tools mentioned above.
“It’s also about internal improvements using AI,” Khan added. “For example, we have fed all of our support tickets into an AI engine to see how many could be auto-answered, which helps with productivity. It also includes leveraging copilots for writing, editing and testing code.”