Multicloud networking startup Aviatrix Systems Inc. today announced that it has closed a $200 million round of growth funding valuing it at $2 billion.

The round nearly triples the $700 million-plus valuation that Aviatrix reportedly received after its previous funding round six months ago. That valuation, in turn, was more than double what the startup had been worth at the end of 2019.

Aviatrix said today that noted growth equity firm TCV led the $200 million round. The investment represents a valuable vote of confidence for Aviatrix: More than 135 of the companies TCV has backed over the years either went public or have been acquired. The growth equity firm was joined in the round by Insight Partners, Tiger Global and more than a half dozen existing Aviatrix investors.

Santa Clara, California-based Aviatrix provides a networking platform that enterprises use to manage the flow of data traffic in their cloud environments. Historically, companies using multiple public clouds had to leverage separate networking tools for each platform to manage data traffic. Aviatrix’s platform, in contrast, allows information technology teams to coordinate everything through a single pane of glass.

The platform further eases IT teams’ work by automating common maintenance tasks. Aviatrix automatically optimizes connection speeds by finding the fastest available network path and provides reliability features that reduce the risk of outages. For troubleshooting issues, the startup offers CoPilot, which visualizes technical problems such as overloaded network links holding up data traffic.

Aviatrix says that it’s solving a major challenge for companies adopting the multicloud operating model. “You’ve got to be able to operationalize this. It’s not just about wiring it and building it up – you’ve got to operate it,” Aviatrix Chief Executive Officer Steve Mullaney (pictured) said in an interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE last December.

Alongside the ability to centrally orchestrate data traffic across multiple clouds, the startup provides several features designed to ease operations for companies with specialized networking requirements.

Aviatrix targets, among other companies, enterprise software firms that provide their applications as cloud services. A common approach to delivering applications as cloud services is to set up a dedicated cloud environment for every customer. The dedicated cloud environment hosts a copy of the application that the customer has purchased and runs in isolation from other clients’ environments, which provides a high degree of security.

Delivering an application as a cloud service often involves a lot of technical heavy lifting. If a software firm has hundreds of customers, it might have to set up hundreds of individual cloud environments. Aviatrix provides a feature called Environmental Stamping that speeds up the task by automating much of the manual work involved in configuring customer cloud environments’ network and cybersecurity settings. The feature allows software companies to reuse cloud settings instead of configuring them manually for each customer.

Another major selling point of Aviatrix’s platform is its ability to quickly encrypt data traffic. To avoid cyberattacks, companies often scramble data before sending it from one part of their IT infrastructure to another, for example to a remote cloud environment. The speed at which information is encrypted and decrypted directly influences how quickly it can be processed.

Aviatrix says that its platform significantly speeds up encryption to provide as much as 60 times more IPsec throughput than other approaches. The platform does so by making better use of the hardware resources in a company’s cloud environment. 

Enterprises often transmit encrypted data using a mechanism known as a network tunnel and, usually, only one central processing unit core is assigned to each tunnel. Aviatrix has developed technology that leverages multiple central processing unit cores instead of only one. The extra computing capacity is used to speed up encrypted traffic processing in cloud environments.

“The transformation to cloud is being driven by CEOs to deliver business agility,” Mullaney said in a statement today. “The cloud network infrastructure can’t rely on the horrible, complex operational model of the 1990s data center to deliver on that agility. Enterprises need the visibility and security controls they had on-prem, but with the operational simplicity and automation of cloud.”

Aviatrix said that it will use the proceeds from its newly announced funding round to grow its worldwide sales and support teams. Including this latest investment, the startup has raised a total of more than $340 million in funding to date. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE