Software-defined interconnect startup Stateless today announced the general availability of its Luxon platform and says “five of the top five” cloud and colocation service providers are testing it.

The Denver-based company launched in 2017, and in January closed a $11.3 million Series A funding round. It started talking about its Luxon platform in May, and at the time company executives said it had a “handful” of early adopters.

The multi-tenant platform enables composable Layer 3 network services such as routing, security, and automation to interconnect points. The software runs on commodity hardware, and it makes interconnection “simple, composable, and scalable,” said Eric Keller, Stateless co-founder and CTO. “Stateless is reinventing how we can build interconnects using software. We’re removing hardware dependencies form the process.”

The startup competes against vendors like Cisco and Juniper Networks, which have NFV-based hardware platforms, as well as SDN and SD-WAN, and providers including F5, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Blue Planet.

“There are many challenges with NFV from an operational standpoint, and also the automation isn’t there, and that’s where we come in,” Keller said. Meanwhile, SD-WAN focuses on building endpoint-to-endpoint networks, and SDN tackles intra-data center traffic management and orchestration.

Using software-defined interconnect, on the other hand, gives users control over routing, switching, and security of every connection without deploying individual network appliances for each tenant or orchestration and management layers, Keller said. The platform provides five-times the number of interconnections while using 50% fewer resources compared with these other technologies, the company claims.

Over the last four months Stateless added new use cases and capabilities to the platform. This includes the ability to create new and “virtually unlimited” groupings of individual network services for interconnections. These groupings can use any combination of security services, data encryption, and routing, among other network services. It also added connection protocols that allow integration into existing networks, and new switching software for more configuration possibilities.

“Underpinning of all this is new switch technology that we’re leveraging where software control is extended to replace customized hardware, and it’s all multi-tenant,” Keller said.

Additionally, Luxon’s multi-tenant environment allows service providers to enable end-users to manage their own interconnects at scale. The platform also lets users automate services including deployment, growth, and failover, while its APIs provide visibility and access all the way down the stack.

The composable design means Luxon can be configured to support numerous use cases, Keller said. Edge connectivity is one example that’s currently in lab tests with a service provider customer looking to provide 40 edge data center locations for a wireless company. “They are using Luxon to allow the wireless company to self-provision interconnects as needed between edge and core locations,” he explained.

A second use case is enabling a service provider to offer enterprises automated, secure connections across a 60-site network.

And a third use case, public cloud connectivity, is “one we think many customers will use,” Keller said. “We’re working with a large service provider that’s already offering cloud onramps to their customers today, but today the process for setting up these connection is complex and customers have limited self-service options.” In this trial, Luxon simplifies hyperscale connections across 200 locations into a single-step action, he said.