Aviatrix Raises $40M Growth Round

Cloud networking startup Aviatrix today announced $40 million in fresh funding, in a Series C round led by CRV. Also participating in this round are previous investors Formation 8, Ignition Partners and Liberty Global Ventures. The four-year-old startup’s total funding is now more than $76 million.

Aviatrix overlays enterprise multi-cloud environments with networking and security software, which it orchestrates via its own controller. Aviatrix software works with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Services include transit networking, network segmentation, next-generation firewall integration, to name a few.

This round will be used, the vendor says, to continue grow “scale sales, channel, customer support, marketing and product development operations to accommodate escalating demand from enterprises moving mission-critical applications from on-premises to the public cloud.”

The timing is on target with what Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney told Futuriom in an interview published last week. Mullaney, a star executive most recently credited with helping software-defined networking (SDN) pioneer Nicira grow big enough to be acquired by VMware for $1.25B in 2012, says enterprise IT is in the midst of the “next transformation in computing.” He sees enterprises finally moving “en masse” to public cloud adoption, and he thinks this will be the turning point for massive industry growth.

“I lived through the mainframe to client server and Internet shift, that was big,” Mullaney told Futuriom Principal Analyst Scott Raynovich. “That transformation built infrastructure companies like Cisco, VMware, Dell, EMC and of course the Internet giants. But this new computing model transformation is going to be 10 times as big and happen 1,000 times faster. “

Aviatrix, which hired Mullaney as CEO in July 2018, appears to be intent on keeping pace with the trend to multi-cloud architecture. With this latest round, it will be interesting to see how the company lives up to Mullaney’s predictions for the industry — and whether, with him at the helm, history repeats itself with a blockbuster exit strategy.