Highlights:

  • The business offers a networking platform that enables businesses to connect their data centers, cloud environments, and other technological assets.
  • Prior to entering the Stateless Core, traffic is encrypted, and it is only decrypted once it has reached its destination.

Graphiant Inc., the networking startup, announced the closing of a USD 62 million funding round led by Two Bear Capital recently.

Six months after emerging from stealth mode, Graphiant raised money in a Series B round that also included Sequoia Capital and other institutional investors. The startup has so far raised USD 96 million in total.

Khalid Raza, the company’s Founder, and CEO is in charge of the San Jose, California-based business. In the past, Raza founded Viptela Inc., a networking startup that Cisco Systems Inc. purchased in 2017 for USD 610 million. For interconnecting technological systems, Viptela provided a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) platform.

Razan said, “The reaction to Graphiant’s network edge has been swift and enthusiastic. It has been much faster than what we saw with MPLS at Cisco or SD-WAN with Viptela.”

The business offers a networking platform that enables businesses to connect their data centers, cloud environments, and other technological assets. In the past, it took weeks or months to deploy the network infrastructure required to connect such assets. According to Graphiant, its platform enables the rapid provisioning of new connections.

A platform is offered as a service by the startup. It promises a 67% lower cost of ownership than competing products, which frequently demand a significant upfront hardware investment. Additionally, the startup claims that its technology expands the bandwidth that is accessible to customers.

The Graphiant Stateless Core is a system that the platform uses to transfer traffic between client systems. Prior to entering the Stateless Core, traffic is encrypted, and it is only decrypted once it has reached its destination. This method ensures that data cannot be decoded while in transit, lowering the possibility of data breaches.

By adding a metadata label to each packet before it leaves, the platform controls the flow of traffic. This metadata label informs the network of the best path for a packet to take in order to get to its destination. The extra data that the platform attached is removed once the destination is reached.

To process packets, Graphiant employs a technology known as Vector Packet Processing or VPP. An open-source framework called VPP was created to hasten the transmission of encrypted network traffic.

The operating system kernel of a server typically processes the traffic that it generates. The most vital parts of an operating system, including the networking engine, are found in the kernel. Graphiant bypasses the kernel and sends packets through a more effective path by utilizing the open-source VPP framework.

VPP enhances performance in additional ways. Typically, packets are processed one at a time, which does not make the best use of the processing power of servers. The task is handled differently by VPP, which gathers several packets into a vector—a sort of software mailbag—and processes them all at once. Performance is enhanced by this method because it makes better use of the onboard cache of server chips.

According to Graphiant, its platform is “strong traction” among businesses and service providers. The company signed deployment and co-development agreements with several customers prior to the funding round it announced recently. It will expand its market presence using the new funding.