Multicloud networking and security startup Prosimo emerged from stealth mode this week with $25 million in funding, led by General Catalyst and WRVI Capital.

Founded in 2019 by former Viptela executives, Prosimo CEO Ramesh Prabagaran and CTO Nehal Bhau, joined by co-founders Linus Aranha and Pradeep Aragonda, set out to address the application performance and security challenges faced by enterprises as they moved to adopt multicloud architectures.

“Our focus is really on delivering application experience for these applications that are moving into either a single cloud or multicloud environment,” Prabagaran said.

He explained that many companies are facing challenges as they attempt to shift workloads into the public cloud because those applications not only have to be accessed by users, but may also need to talk to other applications running in the data center or other public clouds.

The company’s newly launched Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI) platform attempts to address these challenges by leveraging the major cloud provider’s — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — existing backbone networks to automate routing between users and other dependencies wherever they might be.

On top of this, Prosimo has layered on advanced security features including zero-trust network access, identify-aware proxies, and application micro-segmentation, in a bid to reduce the attack surface of enterprise workloads. Finally, AXI features machine learning capabilities, which the company claims allows customers to glean useful insights into application and network performance.

According to Prabagaran, the problem with many of the existing multicloud platforms is they are either network-or security-centric, not both.

He said that many of Prosimo’s early customers said they chose the vendor because it was able to provide zero trust and identity-based security functionally and didn’t rely on network-based security conventions.

Prabagaran added that while there are several security-centric vendors have been able to achieve similar results for user-to-application access, they fail to address the app-to-app communication challenge.

“Cloud complicates this … because the applications are not standalone and users don't just have to access those applications. Those applications have dependencies sitting back in the data center, or in a different cloud, or in a different region of the same cloud,” he said.

Once deployed within each of the customer’s cloud and data center environments, Prabagaran claims the AXI platform can improve page load times by up to 90%, reduce the attack surface by 99%, and cut operating costs by as much as 60%. Meanwhile, machine learning-based insights will continue to inform the customer of recommended configuration changes in order to address performance challenges as they crop up.