Alkira CEO and founder Amir Khan revealed why the vendor opted for a $475 million acquisition by Lumen over going public, revealing the deal – which will see Alkira become the control plane for all of Lumen’s services – quickly came together as Lumen’s east-west and north-south ambitions accelerate.

In an exclusive interview with SDxCentral, Khan reminded this title the Lumen buyout wasn’t his first rodeo, having sold SD-WAN trailblazer Viptela to Cisco in 2017 for $610 million. For Khan, the Lumen acquisition has so far been “wonderful,” in contrast perhaps with typical startup buyouts.

“I think the most important thing for a startup founder or people coming in from the startup is to see that there will be a lot of backing and support to continue to move forward with the solution, and both sides want it to succeed tremendously,” Khan said. “I think that's what excites us because at the end of the day, you want to leave some legacy behind.

“With Vipela, and without going into too much detail, it still continues to be the leading-edge solution from Cisco to customers on the SD-WAN side. So we are proud of that. There were probably a few hiccups here and there, but in general they have continued on that path. The whole team is super excited about joining Lumen and continuing on this path because the support has just been amazing.”

Khan also revealed the deal came together in a short period of time, describing it as a “fairly quick decision from both parties." This fits with Khan’s depiction of Lumen as “close to a startup as you can get” with its flexibility and what he called “high energy” from CEO Kate Johnson and CTO Jim Fowler.

Alkira – the bridge, control plane, and cloud networking 'glue'

Alkira was founded by the Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) veteran a year after the Viptela sale. It raised $21.5 million in a Series A when it emerged from stealth in 2020, going on to raise $176 million in total funding with its network infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) proposition.

Its technology abstracts away the complexity of cloud networking, delivering an agnostic and unified cloud networking fabric for hyperscale customers.

As of last year, the firm boasted around 130 global partners, while customers include Koch, Warner Music Group, S&P Global, and American First Credit Union.

Shortly before the Lumen deal was announced, Alkira claimed to have ended 2025 with 1,261% three-year revenue growth and 252% international annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth. Going back to 2024, that sort of buoyancy saw Khan reveal his ambitions in building an independent and enduring company with Alkira.

“We always build something that is substantial, which we can eventually take public,” Khan said at the time. “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 useful to the customers.”

Fast forward to 2026, and Khan said that when building startups, "you don't necessarily always have in mind whether you're going to go long, or if the right opportunity comes, you give it a serious look."

“We discuss everything with the investors and the team and decide what's the best decision for that particular time,” Khan added. “So it made sense at this time to just go through with the acquisition, and one of the key reasons is that you know the reach that Lumen has and the backing from an investment perspective as well. So it makes complete sense for us to just team up and do amazing things together."

Those “amazing things” will see Alkira’s IaaS service feed into Lumen’s network-as-a-service (NaaS) business, becoming the “bridge between east-west and north-south traffic,” as Johnson put it earlier this year.

In Khan’s words, customers should expect a combination of “the best control plane in the world and the best network infrastructure, physical infrastructure in the world.”

“Customers are really excited. I haven't seen negative sentiment. There may have been ... one or two customers here and there said that, ‘you know, let's see how things go,'" Khan said. "But mostly it has been positive because the majority of the customers that we have are Lumen customers, so there is some level of overlap there. … I think if we had gone to another vendor, that would probably not be as exciting for them.”

Khan added Alkira was already the “glue” between cloud and on‑premises connectivity via Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, IPsec, and SD‑WAN. With Lumen, that glue extends deeper into the private network.

“Alkira brings carrier‑class routing to the table, and there is dark fiber, there is wavelength, there's the multicloud gateway that Lumen sells, and now that brings everything to the edge of the cloud and interconnects clouds, and Alkira sits inside the cloud to optimize the clouds," Khan said. "So the story becomes holistic.”

Pressed on the roadmap ahead, Khan – who will retain his title as Alkira CEO – said long-term plans would be revealed once “we have figured that out as a combined company."

“We had been ... integrating with Direct Connect and ExpressRoute and MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) … so there may be some automation that comes later, but that's something that as we work together as a company, it'll automatically happen," Khan said. “We just want to continue with our head start and focus on execution and make this a huge success in the industry.”