SD-WAN Specialist Aryaka Lands $50M To Fuel Hiring Efforts, 'Channel Velocity'

Aryaka's CEO says that its latest round of funding worth $50 million is ‘validation’ of Aryaka's management team and SD-WAN service. The firm plans to put some of the dollars toward powering its channel efforts.

Aryaka wasn’t proactively looking for another round of funding, but the SD-WAN specialist has just picked up another $50 million in Series F funding led by Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing.

"The funding, which was an inbound request from Goldman, is just a validation that a company like Goldman Sachs is behind Aryaka," the company's CEO, Matt Carter, told CRN. "It's an additional layer of confidence on the competence of the management team and the service we provide in the marketplace. Goldman is bullish on the prospects for Aryaka."

The latest round brings Aryaka’s total funding to $184 million. The company also announced on Wednesday that Matthew Dorr, vice president of Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, will join Aryaka’s board of directors. Michael Kondoleon, vice president of Goldman Sachs Special Situations Group, will join as an observer. Aryaka's existing investors include Trinity Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Presidio Ventures, Third Point Ventures and DTCP.

[Related: SD-WAN Specialist Aryaka Continues Hiring Spree, Taps Olen Scott As Channel Chief]

San Mateo, Calif.-based Aryaka will put the funding to use by further scaling its business operations, going after larger deals, and bringing on new sales and marketing talent, Carter said.

Aryaka offers SD-WAN as a subscription-based, managed service. The company's SD-WAN offering is differentiated in the market because rather than serve up SD-WAN as an overlay, the consumable service is instead tied to Aryaka's underlying global network which makes it easier to scale and guarantee performance, said Shashi Kiran, chief marketing officer for Aryaka.

"SD-WAN is coming off of a hype cycle and there's a lot of pragmatism setting in," Kiran said. Many partners are working on aligning their offerings to more manages service offerings, so Aryaka's SD-WAN services lend themselves to a very partner -- and customer-friendly -- consumption model, he said.

Aryaka in February brought on channel veteran Olen Scott to spearhead its global partner program. The company wanted to expand its footprint and go after SD-WAN opportunities through its growing partner ecosystem, which Scott said he wanted to double. Some of the latest funding dollars will go toward fueling the channel-led company's partner program and channel efforts, Carter confirmed.

"Some of the funding will be used to help build out [Scott's] sales organization and to really invest in programs that allow us to grow our channel velocity," he said.

The firm's executives also said that the funding will go toward planned technology innovations that it plans to introduce later this year. Aryaka added that it is in the midst of making "partner-friendly" changes to its pricing structure.

Aryaka in January brought on Karen Freitag as chief revenue officer, Michelle Owczarzak as chief transformation officer, and Shashi Kiran as the company's new chief marketing officer to help Aryaka scale to the next level of growth. Matt Carter was appointed CEO in September. He formerly served as president and CEO of networking and communications provider Inteliquent. The company also brought on enterprise software veteran Deepak Kumar as senior vice president of customer success in December.

Aryaka -- with 312 employees, according to LinkedIn -- currently has more than 800 global customers, the company said.