Networking-as-a-service startup Alkira Inc. said today it has raised $54 million in a funding round that brings its total amount raised to $76 million.

Koch Disruptive Technologies led the Series B round, with participation from previous investors Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, plus a new investor, GV Management Co. LLC, which has Google LLC parent as its sole limited partner.

Alkira first came to attention when it emerged from stealth mode with $30 million funding in April, launching a Cloud Services Exchange that it said would enable cloud architects to build and deploy multicloud networks in a matter of minutes. The company billed the platform as the world’s first “unified, on-demand multicloud offering” and said its aim was to help connect companies to their public cloud providers, and those providers to each other, to enable more efficient data exchange and distributed application development.

The Alkira Cloud Services Exchange uses what the company calls “Cloud Exchange Points,” which are globally distributed multicloud points of presence that provide a full routing stack and network service capabilities. The software-based service runs on the existing regional infrastructure built by major cloud providers and uses its own network protocols and applications such as load balancers and firewalls.

With the Alkira Cloud Services Exchange, companies can use a simple point-and-click interface to choose the network, network services and clouds they want to connect. The service is comparable to the interconnections offered by large colocation providers such as Equinix Inc., which provide pre-built onramps to various cloud providers.

“After 40 minutes your whole cloud infrastructure is up and running,” Alkira Chief Executive Officer Amir Khan (pictured) told SiliconANGLE’s video studio theCUBE in an interview in April.

Koch Disruptive Technologies President Chase Koch said his company was a customer of Alkira, and that it had seen first-hand how it can simplify a company’s transition to the cloud.

“At Koch’s scale an agile, global, end-to end network is critical to our competitiveness and growth and we are excited to lead Alkira’s Series B investment,” he said.

Alkira said it plans to use the new funds to scale to meet the growing global market demand for its Cloud Services Exchange. “Alkira has seen a tremendous response from customers, and technology and GTM partners to deploy and deliver the Alkira Network Cloud,” Khan said in a statement.

Khan appeared on theCUBE in April alongside his brother Atif Khan, who serves as the startup’s chief technology officer, and they discussed their future plans for the company:

Photo: SiliconANGLE