Viptela Scores Big With Series C Funding Round

If any one of us managed to land $75 million dollars in funding, it would be a cause for celebration lasting potentially days at a time. For Viptela, just such a funding case was won as the company brought in $75 million from its recently-concluded Series C funding round. That puts Viptela's total funding up around $110 million, and the company has some big plans to follow for that money.

The most recent funding round was led by Redline Capital, who brought along both current investors like Sequoia Capital (News - Alert) and new investors like Northgate Capital to help drive the round. The companies put cash behind Viptela as it was an increasingly dominant presence in the rapidly-growing market for software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) systems. Backed up by a breathtaking advance in cloud applications, frequently accessed by an increasingly mobile workforce, the SD-WAN market is experiencing no shortage of upward momentum.

Viptela has already made some great advances in this field; right now, the company counts over 25 Fortune 500 enterprises to its credit as users of its platform, including major retailers, healthcare organizations, and several other types of businesses. Particularly prized among organizations that have large numbers of branch offices, SD-WAN services work to help these locations connect over distances using a common network. This in turn provides a place where cloud applications can work more readily, even if the location in question is some distance away.

As part of the funding, Viptela gained a new board member in Redline Capital director Tatiana Evtushenkova. Evtushenkova subsequently commented “Viptela already has a solid list of blue-chip, Fortune 500 customers and partnerships with Verizon (News - Alert) and Singtel who are using their platform to deliver managed SD-WAN services to businesses. The company is extremely well-positioned to become a dominant player....”

With SD-WAN revenues projected, in a recent IDC (News - Alert) report, to clear $6 billion in 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 90 percent, it's clear that companies have plenty of room for opportunity, but will need to get in in short order to have the best chance of success. There is no shortage of potential use cases for this technology, as even some schools have been getting involved with SD-WAN to connect sometimes widely-dispersed locations.

Viptela has the cash, the expertise, and the already-established market to make a pretty big push into the SD-WAN market going forward. It will likely have plenty of competitors going after that same market, however, so only time will tell if it can hold it together in the long term.