News

Investors Make New $20 Million Bet on Midokura SDN

• By David Ramel
• 06/10/2016

Midokura, which leverages software-defined networking (SDN) technology in its Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) network virtualization offering, this week announced $20.4 million in Series B financing.

The San Francisco-based company said it would use the new funding to accelerate product development, expand management and development teams and form new partnerships in the face of what it called "continued demand for its award-winning network virtualization technology," MEM. Primarily used in OpenStack implementations, that SDN network overlay is the enterprise-enhanced product based on the MidoNet technology it open sourced in 2014.

"Midokura's MEM technology offers an intelligent, software-based network abstraction layer between the hosts and the physical network, by decoupling the IaaS [Infrastructure-as-a-Service] cloud from the network hardware," the company said in a statement. "In turn, operators can build isolated networks in software to overlay the existing hardware-based network infrastructure."

The Series B funding announcement is the latest example of SDN pioneers securing funding for their approaches that leverage SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) amid a networking disruption that's still shaking itself out.

For example, Big Switch Networks Inc. earlier this year announced $48.5 million in funding for its Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric, the latter of which features SDN software running on bare-metal (or white-box) commodity hardware.

Last year, Pluribus Networks secured $50 million in Series D funding to raise the total amount of money it raised to $95 million, which it said made it "the best-funded SDN company in the industry."

Midokura, Big Switch, Pluribus and a host of other companies are raising money to compete for a slice of a market that IDC expects to grow to $12.5 billion by 2020.

The funding came from Simplex Inc. and existing investors Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) and Allen Miner, who sits on the company's board of directors. The new cash infusion brings Midokura's total investment to more than $44 million, Midokura said.

"The network is the enabler of a connected lifestyle, including connected cars and connected devices," said Tatsuya Kato, co-founder and chairman of Midokura. "With the wholesale re-imagination of global industries, from commerce to financial, travel and transportation, software gives rise to a new class of applications that demands higher levels of network agility and performance. Midokura is on a mission to deliver on this demand via our unique approach to network virtualization and make MidoNet the preferred virtual networking solution everywhere."