With new funding, we’re disrupting enterprise networking for good

We have exciting news to share today: Aryaka has raised $16 million in new funding from top-tier Venture Capital firms Nexus Venture Partners (lead), Trinity Ventures, InterWest Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Presidio Ventures.

Our new funding marks a major milestone. Over the past 6 years, we’ve been helping businesses, big and small, cope with a rapidly changing technological and economic landscape. Our initial mission was a simple one: to help enterprises accelerate all of their application traffic to customers, employees, and partners located anywhere in the world.

When Aryaka was founded in 2009, cloud computing was still in its infancy. Yet, we saw a major opportunity. If we could leverage the cloud to remove the complexity, high costs, and long deployment cycles associated with long-haul business-class networking and associated technologies, such as MPLS, WAN Optimization, Application Delivery Controllers, and CDNs, we could open up the benefits of globalization to businesses of all sizes.

I had experienced globalization challenges firsthand with a few of my previous businesses. I had suffered through the frustrations of trying to communicate with an overseas office over the public Internet. Trading large files or dealing with real-time, interactive, or collaborative applications was a non-starter, and the solutions to solve this back in the 1990s and early 2000s were too expensive and complicated for all but the largest enterprises, those that could throw both money and IT resources at the problem.

Fast forward to 2015, and our mission has grown. Globalization was the first major trend we helped businesses tackle, but now there are new trends every bit as disruptive, or even more so, that are keeping CEOs, CIOs, and network managers up at night.

Challenges of the Cloud Age and beyond

First, there is cloud computing. When we were founded, most businesses were skeptical about the cloud. In the past six years, the cloud has grown up, and we’ve grown up right alongside it. Today, if you’re not a cloud-enabled business, you’re in danger of becoming obsolete.

We began by using the cloud to remove complexity. Now, we’re using the cloud to solve cloud-age problems, such as the performance hit that cloud-based apps take when accessed over the Internet.Think of it this way. Imagine that, as traffic continues to get worse in Silicon Valley, what we invest in to solve the problem is on-ramps and on-ramps only. So, no matter where in the Bay Area you are, you can get on I-80, 880, or 101 quickly.

Well, then what? You’ve just sped your way into a traffic jam – and all of those on-ramps have encouraged even more people to speed into the very same traffic jam.

That’s today’s Internet, and that’s the strategy, the telcos are using. They’re building out better first-mile connections for businesses and consumers alike, but they’re neglecting the middle mile, which is now full of even more congestion. We solve that, giving you a fast lane to the cloud and to major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft.

We’re also helping businesses navigate the other major trends bearing down on them. We help them manage mobility, accelerating application access to remote and mobile users, while also preparing businesses for the forthcoming data crunch that Big Data, social media, and the Internet of Things will inevitably usher in.

The advantages of a private fast lane to the cloud

We’ve built a private fast lane to the cloud, and our customers are reaping major competitive benefits by getting on it. Here are just a few highlights:

• Henny Penny, a global leader in food service equipment solutions and the inventor of the first commercial pressure fryer, is using Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service to improve collaboration between its global offices and to fuel its APAC expansion.
• JAS Forwarding Worldwide, a leader in global freight forwarding and logistics, is using Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service to provide a fast, LAN-like user experience for their globally distributed workforce of 3,800+ employees, who need fast access to CargoWise, an ERP solution for logistic service providers.
• Aruba Networks, a leading networking vendor selling enterprise WLAN and edge access networking equipment, picked Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service over the status quo to connect their global offices.
• Tableau Software, the leading global business intelligence and analytics firm, is using Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service solution due to our fully managed service model, zero CapEx pricing, and quick deployment times.
• TiVo, the global pioneer in home entertainment and the developer of the first Digital Video Recorder, is using Aryaka’s WAN as-a-Service owing to excellent performance improvements in terms of latency and throughput. With Aryaka, TiVo has seen up to a 100X speed up for interactive applications.
• Align Technology, a global medical device company and the creators of Invisalign^®, picked Aryaka’s CDN as-a-Service to deliver faster upload/download speeds for remote doctors uploading images in China. Aryaka’s solution delivers 45% faster application performance globally and up to 90% faster application performance in China.
• Oxford Economics, the world leader in global forecasting and quantitative analysis, is using Aryaka’s CDN as-a-Service to improve application response times for their globally distributed user base. Oxford Economics needed to improve network performance for users across the globe to keep pace with their expected subscription business growth rate and to provide the best possible user experience to their web and mobile service delivery channels. Oxford Economics saw a dramatic improvement in application performance of up to 90%.

These are just a few of our clients who are working hard to adjust their businesses to our new global, mobile, knowledge-based economy.

Investing in the future of B2B networking

This new funding will see us through to profitability and an eventual IPO. We’re already growing at a rate of 100% each year, but to accelerate that growth, we need to add more staff, especially in support, channel sales, and marketing. We need to ink more partnerships with various service providers, and we absolutely must continue to deliver the world-class customer service that helps us maintain the industry’s highest customer retention rates.

It’s important to me personally to see Aryaka through to sustainability. When I sold my last company, Speedera, to Akamai, it was a decision I struggled with. It was perhaps the right move at the time, but it wasn’t what my team really wanted. I had employees crying in my office and questioning the move. I made a difficult decision.

But today is different. Today, we’re already recognized as the key WAN as-a-Service innovator. We’re the company that has moved complicated networking technologies to the cloud, so they can be consumed as services. Now, we’re poised to shake up the enterprise networking market once and for all, everything from global WAN connectivity to WAN Optimization to Application Acceleration to CDN services, and I’m not going to be satisfied until I see that mission through to completion.

– Ajit Gupta, Founder and CEO