Midokura Raises $17.3M In Series A Funding For Network Virtualization For IaaS

Today, Midokura announced the finalization of $17.3 million in Series A funding in a round led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan with additional participation from NTT Group’s Venture Fund, DOCOMO Innovations Inc. and NEC Group’s Venture Fund, Innovative Ventures Fund Investment L.P. The funding is intended to expand Midokura’s product development teams and contribute to the refinement of its go-to-market strategy. Coincident with the news of Midokura’s Series A funding is the announcement that Dan Mihai Dumitriu, formerly CTO, replaces Tatsuya Kato as CEO. Co-founder Tatsuya Kato will assume the responsibility of Chairman of the Board. CEO Dan Mihai Dumitriu remarked on the significance of the capital raise and the company’s software defined networking technology as follows:

As enterprises and carriers embrace and build out IaaS clouds, an overlay-based network virtualization platform will soon be a must-have technology. The financial support of Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, and other key backers, validates our strategy as well as the work we’ve done over the past three years developing our industry leading product MidoNet. This funding will enable us to accelerate our product engineering, the establishment of partnerships, and the growth of our customer base. We look forward to delivering the most performant, scalable and fault tolerant network virtualization solution to the IaaS infrastructure market.

Here, Dumitriu neatly summarizes the concept behind Midokura’s Midonet platform, a distributed, software-defined virtual network solution targeted toward IaaS cloud-service providers as well as enterprises. Midokura plays in the space made famous by VMware acquisition Nicira, but is designed differently because of its decentralized, fully distributed architecture as elaborated by Brad Hedlund. The company is already a veteran contributor to the OpenStack community and is in the process of gearing up to announce further partnerships with other cloud platforms in the upcoming months according to Chief Strategy Officer Ben Cherian. Now that the company is flush with a significant infusion of cash, the industry should expect to hear more news about Midokura’s penetration into the U.S. market as its unique software defined networking platform increases its footprint in IaaS infrastructures and delivers simplified network infrastructures and protocols for data transmission in addition to high performance and high availability virtual networking solutions.