If you ask Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney, SD-WAN is dead, the sun has set on the private data center, and the cloud is now the center of the networking universe. And it would seem the company’s investors would agree.

The company today scored $75 million in a Series D funding round led by General Catalyst and backed up by first-time investors Greenspring Associates, Meritech Capital, and TrueBridge Capital Partners. This brings its total raised to $151 million.

Launched in 2014, Aviatrix set out to address the multicloud networking challenge. The company’s platform serves as a cloud-native abstraction layer between virtual private clouds (VPCs) running in any of the major cloud provider’s networks and on premises.

So rather than having to learn how to use and configure Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, a company can configure their resources entirely within the Aviatrix dashboard without having to solve for how to network across clouds.

“The center of gravity is now cloud … it's multiple clouds,” Mullaney said. “We abstract away the details of the native constructs, so now you just need to understand Aviatrix, and we'll handle a lot of the difficulty.”

Aviatrix was among the first companies to “cloudify” networking, said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. “It’s really the first cloud networking technology we’ve seen that actually takes full advantage of the dynamic nature and elasticity of cloud,” he said. “If you think about the world of IT, most things have been cloudified, but network really hasn’t.”

Since Aviatrix was founded, the company has announced integrations with a wide range of SD-WAN vendors for branch-to-cloud connectivity, added support for Palo Alto Network’s virtualized firewalls, and now raised more than $150 million in venture capital.

During this same period, Aviatrix has attracted a steady stream of networking talent and launched the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) training program, which the company claims has now certified more than 11,000 technicians.

Looking to the future, Mullaney wants Aviatrix to become the standard name in cloud networking, the same way that Snowflake is a category leader in cloud data, and he said the latest funding round is a step in that direction.

Aviatrix plans to invest the funding in growing brand awareness through a stronger emphasis on sales, marketing, and lead generation.

Meanwhile, on the technical side, Mullaney said Aviatrix was already looking to take the product “deeper, wider, and higher.”

In other words, widen the scope of the Aviatrix platform to the edge of the network, deepen support for containerized workloads, and abstract away the complexity of the most popular cloud services through tighter API hooks and to thereby enable greater degrees of automation.

While Aviatrix plays in the networking space, the company’s efforts are mainly focused on connecting cloud instances across multiple providers.

By comparison, most SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) vendors, Mullaney argues, are focused on getting to the front door of the cloud and fail to address the inherent networking complexity once you get there.

“All the existing networking vendors don't even understand the limitations, the complexity,” he said. “All of that is happening inside the cloud, not just access.”

According to Kerravala, SASE vendors like Zscaler have addressed the hub and spoke problem by shifting the hub out of the corporate data center and into the SASE point of presence.

“It’s simplified things, but ultimately, it hasn’t really changed the architecture of the network,” he said.