Bigleaf Networks has raked in a $21 million Series B round of funding led by Updata Partners with additional participation from the Oregon Venture Fund, SeaChange Fund and other existing partners.
With the latest round, Beaverton, Oregon-based Bigleaf Networks has raised a total of $28 million to date.
Instead of focusing on large, multinational organizations, which is the SD-WAN domain of VMware/VeloCloud and Cisco/Viptela, Bigleaf positions itself as one of the few SD-WAN vendors that caters to small, medium and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as mid-sized enterprises.
Those companies are also looking for ways to migrate the services and applications to the cloud and deploy more software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
“These SMB and mid-size enterprise businesses are struggling to address their connectivity issues with traditional networking technologies,” said Joel Mulkey, co-founder and CEO, Bigleaf Networks, in a statement. “The other solutions available on the market today aren’t effective for many SaaS and cloud apps, require too much management, and aren’t intelligent enough to adapt to the pace of change in today’s businesses.”
Bigleaf will use the latest round of funding to further address the SD-WAN needs of hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses that want to consume technology in the cloud, as opposed to data centers and server closets.
"Our biggest competition actually doesn’t come from other vendors, but from lack of market education," said Bigleaf's Aaron Kaffen, vice president of marketing, in an email to FierceTelecom. "We’re solving a problem that many of these companies don’t know there’s a solution to. A big part of this funding will go towards helping these businesses understand that there’s a better way to connect their businesses to the cloud and SaaS applications."
Since its last funding round in early 2018, Bigleaf has tripled its reoccurring revenue and employees. Bigleaf's revenue growth has been aided by its focus on partner-led channels. Bigleaf, which was founded in 2012, is available through the telecom agent channel of Telarus, which is a global master agent.
Bigleaf is working in tandem with an increasing number of managed service providers (MSPs) that in turn offer its SD-WAN services to small and medium-sized businesses.
“Bigleaf’s success in the telecom channel was built through our relationships with hundreds of forward-looking partners who could see the growing need for a more stable and reliable connection to cloud technologies,” said Bigleaf’s co-founder and vice president of sales, Jeff Burchett, in a statement “MSPs are a natural addition to that channel. With this funding, we’ll be able to extend our reach to more partners in the Telecom and MSP channels and enable them with the training and resources they need.”
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