Arrcus, a vendor specializing in virtual routing and switching, has scored new funding from Hitachi Ventures to fuel its global market reach.
The companies did not disclose the exact funding amount, but Arrcus said Hitachi’s investment brings the vendor’s total Series D funding to over $65 million – marking a roughly 20% increase from the $50 million investment Arrcus announced in February.
Arrcus’ proprietary platform is the Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE), which essentially allows carriers, enterprises as well as cloud companies to tap into “[everything they] would like to do in the realm of routing and switching,” according to CEO Shekar Ayyar.
“As a result, the associated transport and security is also delivered as part of that fabric and infrastructure,” he told Fierce. Some services Arrcus provides include top-of-rack switching for data centers, 5G network routing for telcos and multi-cloud networking for cloud companies and network operators.
“And as we do that, the infrastructure that we provide takes care of that transport networking as well as the security functionality that goes along with that transport,” Ayyar said.
For instance, Arrcus can inspect the origin of packets, or blocks of data traffic, that come into its ACE platform, “and then based on the origins of those routes, make security decisions on, for example, whether to send those packets forward on their routes or kind of send them to a quarantine, if an attack like a DDoS attack is suspected.”
In a prior interview with Fierce, Ayyar noted two primary catalysts driving the need for security in transport – the convergence of the communications and compute worlds as well as the internet’s reliance on Border Gateway Protocol to route packets.
The investment from Hitachi will help Arrcus “increase [its] presence in other geographies,” said Ayyar. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, but it also has offices in Bangalore, India, and Tokyo. Though the U.S. and Western Europe are major markets for Arrcus, Ayyar said the company is “just starting [its] presence in the Middle East, Africa as well as India.”
For Hitachi’s part, the company in a blog post said Arrcus has a competitive advantage in that it offers a flexible, cost-effective, and scalable networking solution that can compete with both large incumbents and smaller disaggregated network operating system providers.
As for what kinds of customers Arrcus attracts, Ayyar explained the company’s technology is “fairly horizontal, so it applies to anyone that has the need for routing and switching.”
But Arrcus is typically seeing growth from sectors like finance, retail, cloud computing and telecom.
“We’ve had for example, a large financial services customer that came in and essentially are using three times the amount of capacity that they had provisioned initially about a year back,” Ayyar added.
Aside from Hitachi, other recent Arrcus investors include VC firms Prosperity7 and Clear Ventures, e-commerce company Lightspeed and telco Liberty Global.