Alkira
Alkira delivers a fully managed "Network Cloud" that provisions global network fabric with built-in firewalling, segmentation, and routing on demand, without customers owning any physical infrastructure.
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Alkira was founded in 2018 by Amir Khan and Atif Khan, the co-founders of SD-WAN pioneer Viptela (acquired by Cisco). Their thesis with Alkira is that enterprises should be able to consume an entire multicloud, multi-region network — with integrated security services like firewalling, IDS/IPS, and segmentation from partners such as Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, and Fortinet — as a subscription service rather than building and operating it themselves.
The company’s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model abstracts away routers, gateways, and point-to-point VPN tunnels in favor of a cloud-delivered fabric that can be reconfigured through software. It has raised roughly $184M across five rounds, including a Series C led by Tiger Global, Sequoia, and Kleiner Perkins.
The appeal to CISOs is largely about reducing the attack surface and configuration drift that comes from hand-built, multi-vendor network security stacks spread across data centers and clouds.
Innovation Matrix Assessment
Regular expansion of partner security-service integrations (Palo Alto, Check Point, Fortinet) shows consistent but incremental product cadence.
Consolidating network provisioning and security policy into one cloud service reduces operational toil for network and security teams managing multi-region infrastructure.
Five funding rounds and backing from Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Tiger Global signal investor confidence, though the company has not disclosed large enterprise logos publicly at Aviatrix's scale.
Selling the network itself as a service, with security baked in, is a genuinely different consumption model than appliance- or agent-based network security.
Security depends on third-party service integrations (Palo Alto, Check Point) rather than Alkira's own detection engine, so efficacy is largely inherited from partners.
The NaaS model addresses durable enterprise pain around multicloud network complexity, though it competes with well-capitalized SASE and cloud-native alternatives for the same budget.
Why CISOs Should Care
Alkira lets security teams enforce consistent segmentation and inline security-service chaining across data centers, branches, and multiple clouds from one console, cutting the misconfiguration risk of hand-stitched network security.
What Makes It Different
Instead of selling appliances or agents, Alkira sells network infrastructure itself as an on-demand cloud service with security functions built into the fabric, competing more directly with the idea of building your own WAN than with a traditional firewall vendor.
The Matrix Verdict
58/100 — INCREMENTAL INNOVATOR
A founder team with a strong prior exit and a genuinely infrastructure-level approach to network security, but still a mid-stage private company competing against much larger SASE incumbents for the same architectural real estate.
Editorial Note: Claims vs. Verified Findings
Funding totals and investor names are drawn from company and press disclosures; independent verification of customer-reported security outcomes was not found.
Sources
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