Data center software vendor Kaloom announced today that it has locked up $10 million in a series A1 round of funding to bring its total to $20.7 million.
The recent financing was led by the Fonds de solidarité FTQ and Somel Investments with participation from MBUZZ Investments. Both Fonds de solidarité FTQ, and Somel Investments took part in Kaloom's first round of financing two years ago.
Kaloom, which was founded in 2014 by CEO Laurent Marchand, is based in Montreal and has an office in Santa Clara, California. The company is using some of the funds to increase its headcount from 70 employees to 100 by the end of this year.
It will also further invest in its Software Defined Fabric (SDF) product family—which became generally available last month—that was designed to automate and virtualize data centers.
RELATED: Kaloom bows programmable data center fabric to increase automation
With its software, Kaloom is looking to be a disrupter in the data center space. Its SDF portfolio, which includes its software-defined fabric, virtual router, virtual switch and virtual gateway, works with open networking white boxes—including Accton and Delta—in order to reduce capex. Its automation capabilities reduce opex and cut down on deployment and configuration errors.
Currently, automation in data centers has been very labor-intensive and error-prone as employees spend a lot of time writing configurations. By contrast, the Kaloom SDF portfolio has self-forming and self-discovery capabilities. It also features zero-touch provisioning of virtual networks and virtual components via automated software upgrades.
The fabric software, which was designed for use by data center operators, cloud providers, telcos, enterprises and the gaming industry, uses the P-4-based programming capabilities of Barefoot Networks' Tofino chipset.
Kaloom offloads data plane functions from virtual machines and containers, which deliver an increase in throughput of up to 2x with a reduction in latency of 7x over conventional switches.
“The latest funding round is validation of Kaloom’s approach and where we believe the industry is moving; enabling us to grow faster than planned and respond to growing customer demand," said Marchand in a prepared statement.
Kaloom collaborates with Red Hat
On Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Kaloom announced it was working with Red Hat on a virtual central office (VCO) solution for multivendor NFV deployments across virtualized data centers, mobile networks and cloud edge.
Kaloom's automated VCO networking solution works with Red Hat’s NFV infrastructure. The combined platform leverages Kaloom’s programmable fabric to help increase the performance and lower the latency for NFV applications.
By tapping into some of the newest capabilities in open source software-defined networking (SDN), the Red Hat VCO solution is designed to extend functionality to support virtualized next-generation mobile services and helps define a multivendor central office for both 4G and 5G.
"The newest capabilities in open source SDN refers to the fact that this product is based on an evolution of VCO 1.0 designed to add next-gen mobile capabilities," said Kaloom CTO Suresh Krishnan in an email to FierceTelecom.
Krishnan said the VCO platform was the result of a collaboration between OPNFV and Red Hat. It blends capabilities, such as vRAN, vEPC and MEC, onto a VCO for virtualized 4G and 5G mobile environments that target both residential and enterprise services.
Krishnan said VCO 1.0 was available now. It's currently in labs with beta customer trials slated for early next year.