Alkira turned the least cloud-like part of cloud computing - the network - into an on-demand service. Eight years, $176 million in funding and one $475 million acquisition later, its biggest test is whether software and fiber can finally behave like one product.
The company behind MiFi escaped a debt squeeze by selling telematics for $52.7 million and narrowing its bet to 5G hardware plus cloud software. The turnaround offers a practical lesson in focus - and a warning about betting too heavily on a few giant carriers.
Arrcus wants the network to stop arriving as a sealed appliance. Its software runs across white-box switches, clouds and edge sites - and now the company is betting that AI will make that freedom more valuable.
Netmaker is an open-source virtual networking platform built on WireGuard that automates fast, secure, distributed mesh networks across clouds, data centers, edge sites, and devices. Founded by former IBM cloud engineers Alex Feiszli and Dillon Carns, it lets teams stitch together servers, containers, IoT devices, and remote users into a single flat, encrypted network - a kind of VPC for distributed systems. A YC W22 company, Netmaker pairs a widely adopted open-source project with paid Professional and Enterprise editions aimed at businesses and managed service providers.
Extreme Networks is a Nasdaq-listed enterprise networking company that designs wired and wireless infrastructure - switches, Wi-Fi access points and SD-WAN - and pairs it with cloud-managed, AI-driven software. Built around ExtremeCloud IQ and the newer Extreme Platform ONE, the company delivers cloud and increasingly AI-native networking to more than 50,000 customers worldwide, from NFL stadiums and hospitals to schools, factories and retailers. Headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina, it competes with Cisco, HPE Aruba, Juniper and Arista by pitching a single, simpler platform that unifies networking, security and analytics.