Former Contrail Systems CEO Ankur Singla’s new startup Volterra officially launched today with more than $50 million in funding and over 30 customers including Softbank using its distributed cloud platform.

Co-founders Singla and Harshad Nakil, Volterra’s CTO, started working on the new company about two years ago to solve a customer problem: a growing amount of data and applications residing outside data centers, in multiple clouds, and edge locations. And this leads to data management and security problems because customers didn’t have a unified way to deploy and manage applications or enforce consistent security policies across environments.

“The platform needs to be distributed where the data is,” Singla said in an interview with SDxCentral. “The whole thing needs to look like a logical cloud for the customer, and that’s the same when you cross clouds or move to the edge.”

Singla also founded Contrail, one of the earliest telco NFV and SDN companies. Juniper Networks bought Contrail in late 2012, and Singla continued to lead Contrail at Juniper until 2017.

Volterra says its cloud-native, software-as-a-service (SaaS) based platform solves this problem. It can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge locations — customers can use their own or Volterra’s hardware for edge deployments — and integrates a number of services. The platform enables fleet-wide app and data management across heterogeneous infrastructure using a control plane with Kubernetes APIs for orchestration. It also provides multi-layer security for workloads and data, we well as compute, storage, and networking for distributed edge locations. And finally, it provides global connectivity across edge sites, private clouds, and multi-cloud environments using Volterra’s own backbone and 11 points of presence (PoP) at launch.

“And we are growing quite rapidly,” Singla said. “It takes us less than one day to have a new PoP and connect it to our backbone.”

The platform contains three pieces called VoltStack, VoltMesh, and Volterra Console. VoltStack deploys and manages distributed applications. VoltMesh provides the SDN and security piece across clouds and edge sites. And Volterra Console is the centralized management and observability console.

The Santa Clara, California-based startup says it has raised more than $50 million to date. Investors include Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, Microsoft’s venture arm M12, Itochu Technology Ventures, and Samsung NEXT. Volterra has more than 100 engineers and over 30 global customers. These include telcos, banks, and technology companies, among other industries. Multinational financial services firm UBS, Japanese conglomerate and Sprint’s parent company SoftBank, and internet service provider Datacenter Luxembourg are three of Volterra’s customers listed on its website.

“We are excited to work with Volterra to architect an unprecedented edge computing environment across our 5G network,” said Keiichi Makizono, SoftBank SVP and CIO, in a statement. “Volterra has demonstrated that it solves critical operational challenges within existing telco cloud service offerings, increasing operator efficiency and revenue streams while delivering a cloud-native experience that will drive developer adoption.”