Net Vendor Midokura Raises $20.4M
Software network virtualization specialist Midokura announced a $20.4 million funding round this week as uptake of its network virtualization platform gains momentum.
The Series B funding round announced Wednesday (June 8) brings the networking startup's funding total to $44 million. Participating in the round were Japanese financial technology company Simplex Inc. along with existing investors Innovation Network Corporation of Japan and Midokura board member Allen Miner.
San Francisco-based Midokura is targeting the enterprise network virtualization market and its ability to automate most functions on public, private and hybrid clouds along with emerging application container and other micro-services deployments.
The company said it would use the funding to advance development of its enterprise MidoNet network virtualization platform to support growing demand for micro-services and support for devices and sensors linked via the Internet of Things. The company also said it expects to expand product development while strengthening its development team.
The networking startup is attempting to capitalize on steady industry adoption of OpenStack and application container orchestration platforms. Emerging micro-services infrastructure would require greater network virtualization and deployment of software-defined networks (SDN), the company asserted in a statement announcing the funding round.
In an otherwise fast-moving network virtualization market, SDN technology has been relatively slow to catch on. Still, vendors like Midokura cite industry estimates predicting that the global SDN market could grow by more than 50 percent annually over the next four years. Other estimates peg the size of the SDN market at about $35 billion by 2018.
Midokura's network virtualization platform delivers network services such as switches, routers, load balancers and firewalls between layers 2 through 4 of the network stack. The virtualization layers support OpenStack, vSpshere and custom platforms with container orchestration tools like Docker and hypervisors such as KVM (kernel-based virtual machine).
The network provider said customers include Blue Jean Networks, Dell, configuration management specialist Puppet and German managed hosting specialist SysEleven. Midokura joined Dell's Open Networking Initiative in December 2014.
In April, Midokura announced that Dell would offer MidoNet as an "optional performance accelerator" for Dell's Red Hat OpenStack cloud platform, an on-premise cloud platform based on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OpenStack.
Red Hat has a suite of networking plugins for its OpenStack networking service called Neutron, but MidoNet represents the first certified plugin for RHEL OpenStack Platform 7, Dell said.
Industry analysts said the latest funding round would help Midokura scale its networking virtualization business. "Network virtualization and SDN provide the network with the agility and flexibility it needs to support hybrid cloud initiatives and next-generation workloads based on containers and micro-services," Brad Casemore, IDC's research director for datacenter networking, noted in a testimonial for Midokura.
