CloudGenix Scores $65 Million To Continue Push Against Cisco, VMware
CloudGenix just raised $65 million in Series C funding that the channel-friendly SD-WAN player said will go toward investing more in partners and winning against the incumbent tech giants.
On the heels of another high-growth year, CloudGenix has raised another $65 million in Series C funding that it said will help the SD-WAN startup continue to give industry heavyweights a run for their money.
CloudGenix has spent the past six years going up against competitors like Cisco and VMware routinely and winning, the company's founder and CEO, Kumar Ramachandran told, CRN. CloudGenix, which does 100 percent of its business through the channel, will use its latest round of funding to deepen its U.S. presence and make more investments with the channel.
The Series C funding follows a year of rapid growth—300 percent year-over-year with more than 90 percent of that growth coming from wins over incumbent networking providers, Ramachandran said.
"Our plan is to continue to grow significantly faster than the market," he said. "Now that there are a smaller number of companies that are stand-alone and singularly focused on SD-WAN, I think we are poised to be the breakout private company in this space."
The most recent round of funding brings CloudGenix's total close to $100 million since it was founded in 2013. The company's latest round of funding includes existing investors, such as Bain Capital Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Intel. ClearSky Ventures, which focuses on security and network infrastructure, is a new investor.
In addition to its core product, CloudGenix has been working on making integration easier between its SD-WAN offering and core services needed to run the branch office, such as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and security. CloudGenix today partners with some of the leading security, UCaaS and cloud providers, which lets customers tie their SD-WAN and security technologies together for a more integrated IT solution. Its partners include Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and Zscaler on the security side, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure in the cloud, and RingCentral and Fuze for UCaaS.
CloudGenix is targeting distributed enterprises today and it's been able to pick up some of Cisco's install base as those customers move off of their first-generation SD-WAN products, Ramachandran said.
"We are repeatedly running into those customers and taking those products out," he said. CloudGenix is also seeing an uptick in customers interested in CloudGenix's flavor of SD-WAN as they move workloads into the cloud and adopt UCaaS solutions, he added.
"As customers make these migrations, they are asking how CloudGenix can make those deployments better," Ramachandran said.
CloudGenix is partnering with many of the large systems integrators and master agents today to bring on new agent and VAR partners. The provider also wants to go deeper with its existing partner base by expanding its investments in the sales teams that support channel partners, as well as its market development funds.
"We are augmenting our resources significantly for channel engagement globally," Ramachandran said. "We expect to increase the marketing dollars we make available to our channel partners for customer engagements substantially."