Cloud networking startup Alkira Inc. today announced that it has secured a $100 million Series C funding round led by Tiger Global.

The investment, which brings the company’s total outside capital to $176 million, included the participation of NextEquity Partners, Dallas Venture Capital and Geodesic. Returning backers Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and KDT contributed as well.

“The explosive growth of cloud applications and AI workloads are fueling a surge in demand for agile, secure, scalable, cost-efficient networking solutions,” said Alkira Chief Executive Officer Amir Khan. “We’re fortunate to have strong partners to help us meet that demand while we accelerate growth.”

Connecting geographically disparate technology assets such as servers historically required companies to buy specialized networking hardware. Alkira offers a cloud-based networking platform that promises to remove that requirement. It allows companies to link together disparate data centers, cloud environments and employee devices without deploying additional on-premises hardware.

Alkira provides a centralized console for managing the different components of a network. According to the company, administrators can isolate those components from one another to make it more difficult for malicious traffic to spread within the corporate network. Alkira can, for example, ensure the marketing department’s applications are not accessible to users from other teams.

Companies often use network isolation tools together with firewalls. The latter software is used to detect malicious traffic and block it, as well as make sensitive workloads inaccessible via the public web. As part of its feature set, Alkira provides capabilities that promise to ease the task of deploying firewalls in cloud environments. 

The platform includes a marketplace that allows customers to easily download popular third-party firewalls. From there, they can use a graphical interface to install the purchased software. An autoscaling feature can automatically provision more cloud infrastructure for a firewall when there’s an increase in the amount of network traffic it processes.

The company’s platform doubles as an observability tool. According to Alkira, administrators can use it to map out all the cloud resources in a network and identify assets with lackluster cybersecurity settings. The platform’s monitoring features are likewise capable of finding unused infrastructure that should be deprovisioned to cut costs.

Alongside its core feature set, Alkira provides a virtual private network tool that workers can use to log into business applications via encrypted connections. The company says that its platform can likewise power extranets, corporate networks that are accessible not only to a company’s employees but also to third parties such as suppliers. Setting up extranets historically required buying specialized on-premises appliances.

Alkira will use the proceeds from its newly announced funding round to enhance its platform. According to the company, the effort will place an emphasis on adding more cybersecurity and artificial intelligence features. It also plans to upgrade its platform’s extranet capabilities.

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