Aryaka Gets $50 Million Goldman Sachs Investment, Plans Personnel Expansion

Aryaka Networks‘ funding total has ticked up to $184 million after a new investment from Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing poured $50 million into the software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) provider in a round of Series F funding. Goldman Sachs vice president Matthew Dorr will join Aryaka’s board of directors.

Dorr said his organization chose Aryaka because of its established global footprint, customer base, management team and unique technology platform. Aryaka touts a global private network that many transcontinental companies find attractive for carrying data across the Pacific.

Cato Networks, a fierce Aryaka rival that also boasts its own network, drew a $55 million round in earlier this year to reach $125 million total.

A group of investors raised $45 million for Aryaka in spring 2017.

“We’re constantly evaluating the market for high-growth companies that are leaders in their space,” Dorr said. “Our research shows that Aryaka offers a compelling solution for the SD-WAN market that continues to grow exponentially including increased adoption of SD-WAN managed services.”

Aryaka’s Matt Carter

Aryaka CEO Matt Carter said his company hadn’t been actively fundraising and described Goldman’s investment as “inbound.” He said Goldman Sachs is looking intently into the SD-WAN space. SD-WAN sales will grow 59% compounded annually over the next two years, according to Gartner.

“They had a lot of options looking at other companies,” Carter told Channel Partners. “I don’t know where all their investment dollars go, but I’m under the impression from them that they targeted this space, and they really homed in on Aryaka.”

The San Mateo, California-based vendor will use the new funds to “scale business operations,” and one such way to do that is hiring talent across all areas of the company. Carter said new faces will join Aryaka’s sales, marketing, network engineering and software development groups.

Aryaka and its rivals are battling to stay ahead of each other to hire and retain the best talent. And you can never get enough talent.

“There [are] just more jobs than there are people to fill. We’re not immune from the challenges of trying to attract talent, but the good news here is, now that we have the additional funding, it allows us to be able to position ourselves to hopefully attract the right kind of talent and help them continue our growth strategy,” Carter said.

Aryaka revamped its leadership team six months ago, assembling a group of executives that fit well with Carter’s vision. Carter joined in the fall with the stated intention of raising Aryaka’s global profile.

Aryaka’s Shashi Kiran

Chief marketing officer Shashi Kiran, who is one of the recent appointees, said Aryaka is a “channel-led” company whose number of deals brought on by partners is increasing. He said the company hopes to recruit new partners and scale market opportunities for its existing base in 2019. One strategy is to maximize partners’ up-sell and attach opportunities.

Kiran said Aryaka will unveil new innovations to its platform this year in addition to signing new strategic partners. The vendor has already signed partnerships public cloud providers AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and Oracle. Many of the new strategic partners will share systems integrators and channel partners with Aryaka. Those mutual channel partners stand to benefit.

“It would be an additive offering that they can take to the market, where one plus one is greater than two,” Kiran said.

Carter said Goldman is affirming Aryaka and “betting” on its leadership team.

“We couldn’t be more happy about the future prospects of the company. We’re growing at a healthy pace, and this new investment allows us to accelerate that growth going forward,” he said. “It’s all good stuff for all our stakeholders: our channel partners, our employees, our customers.”