DevOps is dumb, SD-WAN was a bubble market, and networking is cool again, Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney opined in the wake of a $200 million Series E funding round.

Today’s funding round, led by TCV with Insight Partners and Tiger Global joining, brings the multicloud orchestration vendor's valuation into double unicorn territory at $2 billion, but Mullaney aspirations don’t stop there. He sees Aviatrix skyrocketing to market leadership as the next Databricks, Snowflake, or HashiCorp.

“We’re $2 billion now, my guess is in seven to nine months we’ll be $5 billion to $6 billion, and probably another seven to eight months after that, we’ll be $10 billion, and at some point we’ll go IPO,” he said. Unlike Snowflake, Aviatrix won’t wait more than two years to hold an initial public offering (IPO), he added. “I don’t think we’ll need the $1.4 billion that Snowflake got invested in.”

Founded in 2014, Aviatrix’s platform serves as a cloud-native abstraction layer between virtual private clouds running in any of the major cloud providers' networks and on premises. The company has raised $340 million to date across five funding rounds, with the last in February garnering $75 million.

Aviatrix's strategy is built around eliminating the networking barriers to cloud adoption. Mullaney compared the cloud providers to all-inclusive resorts, where basic services are provided, but if a customer needs something special they’re out of luck. The platform integrates with each of the cloud providers at an API level, allowing the platform to orchestrate the networking of resources.

The cloud allows development teams to move quickly without being hampered by the networking team, and as a result developers make compromises to start doing operations themselves, according to Mullaney. The problem with that, of course, is that developers aren't especially good at networking or security, he added. they made that compromise and starting doing operations themselves, he said, adding the problem is the dev teams weren’t any good at networking or security.

Every developer team thinks about the apps and data first but neglects networking and network security until it’s already too late, Mullaney explained.

This is where Aviatrix's multicloud platform comes in. Rather than having to learn how to use and configure Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, a company can configure its resources entirely within the Aviatrix dashboard without the complexity of securely networking across clouds.

“The investors know all the spoils are going to go to the category leaders. So the No. 1 priority for everyone is to be that vendor, be that dominant architectural platform that everyone goes to, and we’re becoming that,” Mullaney said, adding the latest funding is key to achieving this goal.

“That $200 million that we raised is going to add sales, add partners, add engineering, continue the acceleration of our innovation to just slam the door on anyone [else],” he added.

Aviatrix also plans to double its staff to more than 500 over the next year.

“We’re dramatically hiring sales teams… We’re going to spend more marketing, we’re going to add way more engineers. Because this is the next 30-40 years, we’re going to keep innovating and coming out with more and more functionality,” he said.

Aviatrix also, following this latest funding round, gains a new board member in Tim McAdam, general partner of TCV.

“Enterprise adoption of a multicloud strategy has gone mainstream, which combined with an outstanding team, drove our decision to invest in the cloud networking leader of this massive market transformation,” McAdam said in a statement.