Software-defined wide-area network startup CloudGenix Inc. is looking to disrupt more established networking companies after announcing a hefty $65 million funding round today that takes its total amount raised to almost $100 million.

Existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Intel Corp. participated in the Series C round alongside new investors, including ClearSky Ventures.

SD-WAN companies such as CloudGenix are growing increasingly prominent as they offer a more flexible alternative to the traditional network infrastructure sold by bigger rivals such as Cisco Systems Inc. In the case of CloudGenix, it claims to provide up to twice the performance at half the cost, mainly by shifting the all-important network management processes from the hardware to the services and the locations that it’s meant to serve.

By doing this, CloudGenix reduces the amount of effort required to translate business requirements into operations, allowing administrators to regulate consumption and security across different types of connections without worrying about the implementation details. And the ability to handle all of that from a centralized console makes it easier to deliver services to remote offices at the far reaches of the network.

CloudGenix said policies defined in its controller are automatically extended to new endpoints, which removes yet another chunk of manual work and reduces the burden on the edge in the process, thereby enabling branch offices to make do with cheaper, white-box networking equipment.

CloudGenix’s pitch is perhaps not so different from the numerous other companies trying to stake a claim in the SD-WAN market, but the company has done well on the customer acquisition front. For instance, it counts the likes of Coca-Cola Co. and Columbia Sportswear Co. among its major customers.

More important from its investors’ perspective is its rapid growth. In the last year CloudGenix has seen its revenue grow by 300%, and it also claims to have completed the largest “Gen-1 SD-WAN replacement in the industry” at an unnamed retailer with more than 2,000 physical locations.

This was an especially important deployment for the customer, since it had previously grappled with more than 10,000 support tickets per year with its original network supplier, CloudGenix said. By using CloudGenix’s SD-WAN, the customer eliminated more than 99% of these tickets, many of which required manual intervention to remedy the problem.

“CloudGenix is the only vendor that is based on application flows, while other SD-WAN products only see the traffic on the network as a series of zeros and ones, or bits and bytes,” Chief Executive Officer Kumar Ramachandran told SiliconANGLE.

CloudGenix’s SD-WAN platform is all the more useful because it can integrate with a wide range of technologies, including public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, security systems from companies such as Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Symantec Corp. and application developer tools such as ServiceNow and PagerDuty.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE the reason CloudGenix raised so much money is that enterprises are increasingly realizing the importance of SD-WANs.

“They realize networking is a cost factor, an inhibitor to customer and employee experience, as well as a showstopper for their digital transformation projects,” Mueller said. “Hardening WAN infrastructure and moving it to a software-defined networking model is the agenda of 2019.”

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