Arrcus secured $50 million in a Series D equity round, with investments lead by Prosperity7 Ventures. The funding follows a more than doubling in sales bookings last year, and a 70% increase in the vendor's global headcount.

Prosperity7 Executive Managing Director Aysar Tayeb stated its backing Arrcus as a “disruptive leader” in this space. The vendor competes against larger networking software rivals like Cisco, Arista, and Juniper Networks.

Arrcus CEO Shekar Ayyar, a former VMware executive, told SDxCentral the vendor's growth is in large part due to its Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE) platform – a three-layer stack to connect enterprise data centers with service or cloud-provider infrastructure – and its use case versatility “across the network from edge to multicloud and from enterprise to service providers.”

The vendor's ACE platform combines its ArcOS, ArcIQ, and ArcOrchestrator [FlexMCN] products. “It is completely disaggregated and agnostic to the underlying platform,” Ayyar explained. “This enables it to be deployed on merchant silicon-based switches, routers, compute resources, as [a virtual machine] or container, and anywhere – on-prem or in the cloud.”

Ayyar also sees growth opportunities in India's emerging 5G market.

“India is an exciting growth market for network operators, and 5G is a transformative technology that can enable ubiquitous broadband access to bridge the digital divide,” Ayyar said. “With a population of about 1.4 billion people and millions of industrial enterprises, the country will be one of the largest mobile and fixed-wireless infrastructure deployments.”

Ayyar says the challenge for telecom operators now is around driving higher average revenue per user (ARPU) while simultaneously “containing costs,” adding that 5G business services like network slicing present “the opportunity for new top-line growth.”

He added that the vendor's ACE platform allows “operators to monetize the 5G infrastructure and easily deliver these 5G services with a lower [total cost of ownership]. Using innovative packet forwarding and routing technologies can dramatically simplify carrier infrastructure and reduce cost while enabling new services like slicing.”

Ayyar said Arrcus takes advantage of three infrastructure trends that aid networking challenges across enterprises, telecom providers, and cloud providers: the shifts of 4G to 5G, cloud to multicloud, and consolidated to edge computing.

Within the enterprise, the focus is modernizing existing data center networks “with cost-effective and programmable routing and switching to drive greater efficiencies and better economics,” which Ayyar touts Arrcus' routing and switching address.

From the telecom and internet provider perspectives, its ArcOS-based gateways and provider edge help address challenge of monetizing 5G and edge investments and creating a secure and visible end-to-end network.

And the Arrcus FlexMCN product helps cloud networking providers connecting across public and private clouds “with uniformity in networking policies,” Ayyar added.