Session-oriented routing provider 128 Technology has raised $21.5 million in series C funding, bringing the total capital raised to date to $57 million.
Participating investors in the round include executive management and current employees of 128 Technology, individual investors, as well as G20 Ventures.
Andy Ory, co-founder and CEO of 128 Technology, told FierceTelecom that what’s different about 128 is that most of its investors are from the company itself.
“It’s true that G20, which is a firm I am associated with, is involved in the round, but the majority of the rounds is done by the insiders, and that has been the case for all of these rounds,” Ory said. “The insiders still own the majority of the business and we think that there’s an opportunity to fix something that’s critical.”
The company plans to will use the latest financing to grow its global presence and accelerate the expansion of the 128T Networking Platform (128T) as organizations of all sizes transform their networks with session-oriented routing.
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Already, 128 Technology has garnered a number of customer wins, including Revation Systems, a cloud-based provider NEC Networks.
Ory said that this latest round of funding is about advancing the company to the next level beyond its initial conception.
“What this round is all about is we now have customers, we have deployed product and we’re working hard to show we can use leverage to identify a market and articulate a particular opportunity and build out a financial model,” Ory said. “What that does is we would like to emerge as an operational company with quite a bit of velocity where we can decide whether we want to organically grow the company or whether we want to get capital for operational expansion.”
At the heart of 128 Technology’s approach is Secure Vector Routing, which enables enterprises and service providers to build networks that are session-based, service-centric and software-defined.
By using session orientation, the company said its 128T Networking Platform can provide secure, deterministic routing without the use of tunnels or overlay techniques.
“What we realized is that session state is everywhere except in the one element that really is the network, which is the routers,” Ory said. “We said what if we put session state into routers and architecturally that’s a real departure from the way networks are built today and if you put session state into routers you transform the way we deliver services and applications.”
Amidst the growing hype around SD-WAN and SDN, 128 Technology wants to offer what it claims to be a new approach to networking. The company said its routing technology can accommodate a broad spectrum of routing applications from the branch office, across the wide area network (WAN), and within and between private and public clouds.
Ory said that the key element of its approach is helping its customers make their networks more efficient and less cumbersome.
“When we started our business, everyone was in love with SDN,” Ory said. “Once people started to deploy SDN, or tried to deploy it, they realized it was really complicated, and when you have an already complex network putting in a new complex architecture does not make sense.”