Aviatrix, which provides a common set of networking and security services to enterprise clients with one or more public clouds, raises $40M Series C led by CRV
Aviatrix, a five-year-old provider of networking and security services for multi-cloud enterprises, today announced …
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2019, VMware moved to buy Avi Networks — an application-delivery-in-the-cloud startup that had raised $115M — signaling that the networking layer for cloud applications had become an acquisition target for the incumbents. Aviatrix, then five years old, was attacking the adjacent problem from a different angle: one common set of networking and security services spanning multiple public clouds, rather than tooling for a single cloud environment.
This $40M Series C, led by CRV, is the starting point of a funding arc that validates that multi-cloud bet: Aviatrix went on to raise a $75M Series D at a $700M+ valuation in early 2021, then a $200M round led by TCV at $2B just seven months later.
First-order effects
- CRV and its syndicate get a position in a company whose pitch — one control plane for networking and security across multiple public clouds — directly addresses enterprises that had been stitching together each cloud provider's native tools.
- Aviatrix gains the capital to build out its platform ahead of the hyperscalers' own multi-cloud offerings, which are constrained by the incentive to favor their own environments.
Second-order effects
- VMware, having bought Avi Networks for application delivery, is pushed to compete on multi-cloud networking from the infrastructure side, while later entrants like Isovalent — which raised a $40M Series B for its open-source Cilium networking and security software backed by Google and Microsoft — attack the same layer from the open-source direction.
- Cloud providers' native networking teams face a customer expectation that policy and security be portable across clouds, pressuring them toward interoperability they would not choose unilaterally.
Third-order effects
- The pattern in the corpus — Aviatrix's valuation climbing from this Series C to $700M+ to $2B, alongside VMware's Avi Networks purchase and Isovalent's open-source raise — points to cloud networking consolidating into a distinct, well-funded category that sits above the hyperscalers rather than inside any one of them.
- If enterprises standardize on cloud-agnostic networking layers, the hyperscalers' networking and security products risk becoming commodity infrastructure underneath third-party control planes, shifting pricing power toward the abstraction layer.
The trend: Multi-cloud networking is emerging as a distinct venture-backed category, with Aviatrix's trajectory from this $40M Series C to a $2B valuation marking the layer's rise above individual cloud providers.