Koch Disruptive Technologies is helping boost the finances of a Silicon Valley-based network cloud startup Alkira Inc.
KDT, a division of Koch Industries Inc. in Wichita, has led a $54-million Series B funding round into the company for which the parent company was an early customer.
“Koch Industries is a significant customer to cloud providers, and we have seen first-hand how Alkira’s powerful and intuitive network simplifies a company’s transition to the cloud,” Chase Koch, president of KDT, said in a press release. “At Koch’s scale an agile, global, end-to end network is critical to our competitiveness and growth and we are excited to lead Alkira’s Series B investment.”
Alkira's technology enables cloud architects and network engineers to build and deploy a point and click multi-cloud network in minutes, with the flexibility to turn services on and off as the business requires.
At Koch, said Jason Illian, managing director at KDT, the results have led to cloud networking operations that used to take between six and 18 months now being done in days or even hours.
In addition to leading a funding round that included, among others, existing investors Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and GV (formerly Google Ventures), Illian will join the board of directors at the company.
“Koch has entrusted Alkira to rebuild their cloud network backbone and expand their network infrastructure to multi-cloud,” said Amir Khan, president, CEO and founder of Alkira. “We are delighted to welcome Jason Illian to our board, and to receive the ongoing support from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and GV on this exciting journey.”
According to a report from the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Amir Khan and brother Atif Khan, the company’s CTO, founded Alkira after selling their last company, Viptela, to Cisco Systems Inc. in 2017 for $610 million.
The deal also continues investment rounds worth hundreds of millions of dollars into new technologies that have been led by KDT since its founding in 2017.
The Chase Koch-led division has invested in companies with specialties ranging from the mobile payment market and advanced ultrasound technologies to 3D metal printing and other cloud computing services.
