Graphiant Closes $62M Funding Round To Propel Channel, Go-To-Market
The channel-friendly edge networking startup Tuesday revealed it had closed a $62 million Series B funding round which will be used to scale its go-to-market team and to build out its channel resources on the heels of its newly launched channel program, G-Force.
Graphiant has revealed that it has closed a $62 million Series B funding round, the Edge networking upstart announced on Tuesday.
Graphiant, which emerged from stealth mode in September, will use the capital to build out its channel resources and to scale its go-to-market team, a critical priority for the company right now, Graphiant Founder and CEO Khalid Raza told CRN.
“[The funding] is for go-to-market growth, feet on the street, and for Matt [Krieg, vice president of sales and marketing for Graphiant], to go convince everybody that this is the new way of doing networking,” Raza said.
The latest funding announcement comes on the heels of Graphiant’s freshly launched channel program, G-Force, earlier this month. The program targets VARs, agents, and telecom service provider partners.
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Raza, the former co-founder and CTO for Viptela who has been dubbed the “father” of SD-WAN, started Graphiant with the prospect of taking aim at Cisco and other formidable SD-WAN providers as increasingly distributed workloads and network complexity creates more complexity and security issues for businesses.
“For me, the ideal situation is that I want the networking vendors to see the value we can provide by giving them a plugin and scale their branch product because their branch products are struggling with scaling,” Raza said.
San Jose, Calif.-based Graphiant offers MPLS-level connectivity between the enterprise WAN, hybrid cloud, network edge, customers and partners. Its solution is delivered as a service through the Graphiant Network Edge. Combining as-a-Service delivery with a high-performance private network lets the company offer SLA-class performance at up to 70 percent less cost, the company said.
“The product is rock solid. Now, from an engineering point of view, it’s about scaling to thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands 1000s,” Raza said.
Simple cloud connectivity and stitching businesses and their business partners together has been a “huge driver” of growth for Graphiant since its launch, Krieg said.
Krieg added that the go-to-market team will grow by 15 percent this year. “We’ll add additional people to go out and drive demand and then assist the channel by bringing in channel engineering resources and channel campaign resources,” he said.
The Series B funding round brings the company’s total funding to $96 million.
Graphiant’s Series B funding round was led by Two Bear Capital with participation from Sequoia Capital, Atlantic Bridge, Harpoon Venture Capital Partners and others, according to the company.
The Effects Of G-Force
Simplicity, said Krieg, has been the company’s theme since its launch and it’s been the theme of the new partner program, G-Force, as well.
“We launched the partner program without levels, no metals, no tiers, none of that. It’s a pretty simple program with guaranteed profitability for the partners and joint marketing funds based on the revenue that we do together,” Krieg said.
The new funding will go toward training, collateral and demand generation for partners, he added.
The company is going to market through its two anchor partners, global solution provider World Wide Technology (WWT) and Trace 3, but plans on doing all of its business through the channel.