Opportunity and apparently money abound in the nascent network infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) (NaaS) market.

Today, San Jose-based startup Alkira announced that it has raised $100 million in a Series C round of funding to help advance its NaaS ambitions and go to market efforts. Alkira was founded in 2018 by Amir Khan who had previously founded SD-WAN pioneer Viptella, which he sold to Cisco for $610 million in 2017.

With Alkira, Khan has been looking to solve a different problem than the one SD-WAN addresses. Alkira's network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform abstracts away the complexity of networking that customers would otherwise have to manage individually with each cloud provider.

“We were looking at the cloud providers, and trying to figure out how networking was done in each one of the clouds,” Khan told SDxCentral. “The most glaring thing was that they were doing things on their own in their own different ways and customers had to learn the nitty-gritty details, the complications and nuances and limitations of each cloud.”

Alkira's solution is to deliver a unified cloud networking fabric for customers deployed across various cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Oracle Cloud.

Alkira's network-as-a-service offering provides customers with a fully managed, scalable, and secure networking infrastructure.

“We have abstracted all clouds to look the same from a networking perspective,” Khan said. “So the customers only care about their VPC, subnets and the workloads and we take over everything else from the customer and we optimize it for them for multicloud.”

With Alkira's solution, enterprises can easily connect their on-premises infrastructure to multiple clouds, create segmented networks, and integrate various network services like firewalls and load balancers, Khan said.

Khan added that Alkiras technology sits inside of the cloud providers. The way customers connect from on-premises is via SD-WAN, Internet Protocol Security (IPSEC) or some other form of direct connect type of capability. Customers connect to Alkira's cloud exchange points and from there a cloud network infrastructure as a service configuration can be defined within minutes, according to Khan.

“Everything happens in the background and it is fully routed, fully segmented and you can create as many segments as you want,” Khan said.

In addition to connectivity, Alkira also integrates with higher-level services including firewall, IP address management (IPAM) and load balancers. Alkira also has its own extranet as a service offering.

Among the newer use cases for Alkira's technology is generative artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

Alkira supports AI workloads by allowing customers to securely deploy and share AI services like machine learning models behind the Alkira network infrastructure.

Khan noted that one organization that uses Alkira has over 200 machine learning models deployed globally behind Alkira for controlled access and security. Alkira provides fully routed and segmented connectivity across clouds and data centers, enabling customers to easily spin up and down AI environments and selectively share resources between network segments hosting users and workloads. He noted that this level of agility and security for AI deployments across hybrid and multicloud environments is valuable for many organizations.

While the funding will help to fuel growth in the near-term, Alkira's founder has grander ambitions of building an independent, enduring company.

“We always build something that is substantial, which we can eventually take public,” Khan said. “But our goal is to keep our eye on the ball and make sure that we are building something that is going to be for a long time to come useful to the customers.”