Multi-cloud startup Alkira raked in $54 million in Series B funding led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT). Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and GV — formerly Google Ventures — also participated in the latest funding round.

The funding round comes just six months after Alkira emerged from stealth mode with $30 million Series A funding.

Founded in 2018 by brothers Atif Khan and Amir Khan, the former CEO of Viptela, Alkira Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) automates and abstracts the complexity of multi-cloud deployments and networking into a point and click service.

To date, KDT is among Alkira's largest customers. "They're a very complicated environment. They have seven global networks. They are in 70 countries; 700 sites and thousands of routers," Amir Khan said in an interview with SDxCentral. "It is as complicated as it can get in any enterprise."

KDT had already begun its cloud migration when it came to Alkira to tie together their on-premises and Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual private clouds, he added.

And when KDT wanted to add desktop virtual services running on Microsoft Azure, the company fielded and approved the deployment in just a day, which is something that Amir Khan said might have taken six months to a year without CSX.

KDT later used CSX to stitch together a network from Mumbai to the Unified States by taking advantage of the existing private cloud backbones to alleviate WAN performance issues for more than 800 employees in India. "They saw significant improvement in performance and latency," he said.

Moving forward, Koch will take a more active role in Alkira's future with KDT Managing Director Jason Illian joining the startup's board of directors.

“Amir and Atif Khan have an unmatched track record, team, and architecture for the Network Cloud, which we believe will be more disruptive than SD-WAN,” said Illian, in a statement. “We see a changing business model as companies recognize the value in moving to a network on demand. In Koch’s case, Alkira’s technology has allowed the company to execute its cloud networking operations in days or just hours from what used to be six to 18 months.”

Atif Khan explains that CSX can be spun up at any number of cloud exchange points (CXP) around the globe. "When we spin those CXPs up for the customers, the customer gets immediate high speed, low latency connectivity, full mesh connectivity between those CXPs as well," he said.

This makes it possible to interconnect locations around the globe in less than an hour, eliminating the need to negotiate multiple WAN links. "From the customer's point of view, it's one network cloud," Atif Khan added.

However, it doesn't stop there. Alkira is doing more than orchestrating the deployment and networking between cloud resources.

"Higher layer services from network and security are built in," he said, adding that within the CXP it is possible to deploy and run services, such as firewalls or load balancers, on traffic before sending them on to their destination.

Finally, CSX now supports remote access enabling customers to tunnel to the nearest CXP before connecting to their final destination, illuminating many of the bottlenecks associated with standalone VPNs.

According to Amir Khan, the latest round of funding will help the company to scale its offering to support larger and more complex deployments.

The company aims to add new functionality to CSX as well as support for a wider array of third-party vendors.