Former VMware NSX Star’s Startup Aviatrix Raises $40 Million

“We’re seeing unprecedented demand from some of the largest organizations, and this latest funding will enable us to extend our demonstrable market leadership even more quickly,” said Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney.

Led by former VMware networking superstar Steve Mullaney, hybird cloud network startup Aviatrix has secured $40 million in a Series C funding round that will be used to scale sales, its channel and product development operations.

“Business and application owners demand networking and security teams provide the same level of resiliency, performance, functionality and security in the cloud as they get on-premises,” said Aviatrix CEO Mullaney in a statement. “The basic constructs of [Amazon Web Services] and the other public clouds do not give enterprises the toolset required to accomplish this, and it is causing a great deal of pain for IT moving to the cloud.”

Founded in 2014, Aviatrix -- named in CRN’s 10 Hottest Enterprise Networking Startups Of 2019 (So Far) -- provides networking and security services aimed at multi-cloud enterprises. Aviatrix’s long list of customers include VMware, Netflix and NASA.

[Related: Nutanix’s Dheeraj Pandey And VMware’s Sanjay Poonen Show ‘Respect’]

Mullaney joined the company as CEO in June, having previously served as CEO of Nicira which was acquired in 2012 by VMware for $1.26 billion. Nicira’s technology set the foundation for VMware’s now multi-billion-dollar NSX networking and security business.

Mullaney served as senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s networking and security business unit, leading the NSX product line for several years before leaving the company. The $40 million will help the Santa Clara, Calif.-based meet the growing demand for enterprises to move mission-critical applications to the public cloud, according to the statement.

“Aviatrix gives enterprise IT an architecture to provide a common set of networking, security and operational services across one or more public clouds,” said Mullaney. “We’re seeing unprecedented demand from some of the largest organizations, and this latest funding will enable us to extend our demonstrable market leadership even more quickly.”

With the new investment, total funding for Aviatrix climbs to more than $76 million. The Series C funding round was led by existing investor CRV with participation from Formation 8, Ignition Partners and Liberty Global Ventures.

Aviatrix said public cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle are becoming the physical infrastructure for enterprise IT. Born-in-the-cloud Aviatrix networking and security software services embrace and extend native public cloud constructs and infrastructure and provide the operational simplicity, security and performance required for enterprises moving to the cloud, the company said.

Aviatrix provides a slew of services including advanced transit networking, network segmentation, firewall integration, smart SAML VPN and site-to-cloud VPN access, cloud to Internet egress filtering and high-performance encryption.

In August, Aviatrix relocated its headquarters to Santa Clara from Palo Alto, Calif. to triple its office space in order to accommodate rapid staff expansion.