Aviatrix Raises $15M in B Round

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  January 18, 2017

Aviatrix, a company that addresses the network part of hybrid cloud, today revealed it has raised $15 million in a Series B funding round. New investor CRV led the round, in which existing investors Formation (News - Alert) 8 and Ignition Partners also participated.

In an interview with TMC yesterday, Aviatrix CEO Steven Mih indicated this development is particularly noteworthy due to the fact that the funding environment cooled off at the end of 2015. That has made it much more difficult for companies to supplement their A round funding, he said.

“We’re extremely excited that we’ve raised a B round,” said Mih.

Aviatrix was able to do that, Mih said, in large part as a result of its proven solution set and well-known customers. The company considers itself a pioneer in hybrid cloud networking. Rajan Panchanathan, vice president of marketing and product strategy at Aviatrix, said the company helps make it “insanely easy” for enterprises to migrate their applications to the public cloud.

Amit Malhotra of no jitter in an article about Aviatrix around this time last year explained that there was a good market opportunity for something like Aviatrix delivers given the existing approach for establishing a hybrid cloud was complex, time consuming, and capex intensive.

 “Enterprises typically install a VPN box and make configuration changes to the edge router, going through corporate policies and opening up ports to the outside world to do so,” Malhotra wrote. “This process can slow down adoption of the hybrid cloud, especially in cases where flexibility and agility are required to meet fluctuating business needs.”

But Aviatrix provides a solution to that problem, by making hybrid cloud networking as on-demand as compute and storage is, said Mih. The company does that by implementing a virtual machine that sits in the data center network. It provides Layer 3 to Layer 2 bridging of the data center using a one-click interface. It doesn’t affect the routing domain of the data center network, he said, but does allow you to extend that domain to the cloud.

Game company GREE, hotel chain Hyatt, and human resources and staffing giant Robert Half are among the companies using Aviatrix solutions today.

Robert Half had moved its operations to the cloud, and was struggling with its edge router configuration, which made the network a bottleneck, Mih said. So it wanted a system that would enable it to set up cloud instances with security, control, and agility. So Robert Half adopted the Aviatrix solution, which lets the company manage many VPCs, have self-service cloud instances, and minimize business disruption, said Mih. That lowered its install times by 98 percent and saved Robert Half millions in capex and opex, he added."

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