Today marks an important milestone in Prosimo’s journey – the beginning of our next phase of application-focused infrastructure. I want to thank all the customers, partners, and, most importantly, our team who has helped us get here.
The First Phase
When we started Prosimo in 2019, we had a differentiated idea that placed cloud workloads in the center with infrastructure – primarily networking and security – built around it. This manifested in a full-stack cloud networking solution that solved our two initial use-cases: user-to-app and app-to-app. This had the distinct advantage of not getting caught in an alphabet soup of networking jargon (SSE, ZTNA, MCN, micro-segmentation, etc.) and focused on use-cases and outcomes. This phase (which we’ll call Phase-1) followed a playbook:
- Investment from legendary investors LipBu Tan, Amarjit, and Steve Herrod, from Celesta, General Catalyst Nepenthe Capital.
- Thinking differently for a unique and differentiated solution — cloud-native and focused on users, apps, and services rather than individual infrastructure components.
- Hiring the right team to build a modern, data-driven, and an unconventional company.
- Drive initial deployment with cloud-forward enterprises that are leaders of their respective industries (list above)
- The start of a budding ecosystem that understands the need for a full-stack viewpoint and acknowledges cloud is the future: Anchor partners (listed above) who saw the disruption and were aligned with the right way to do cloud infrastructure, building on top of hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and IBM cloud.
- Re-defining what it means to provide a solution for cloud networking and going beyond traditional definitions and outcomes for such a market/or category.
There’s no better proof of this than to look at the Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Networking Software from Apr 2021 vs Apr 2022. Every day we hear about how the network lags & hampers cloud adoption – connectivity alone is not enough; you need a full-stack to go beyond connectivity.
The Next Phase
- We’ve seen a 1000% surge in customer activities across POCs, pilots, and deployments. Equally amazing is the pedigree of industry giants and partners who have bet on us for their next-generation products and services. It’s both humbling and at the same time challenging. Similar to the playbook from the previous phase, we have laid out a playbook for this second phase:
Investment from strategic and bullish investors known for building lasting companies and driving GTM acceleration — Redline Capital, BlackRock, and Telekom Innovation Pool (TIP) – Deutsche Telekom. The additional $30M capital raised will provide a lot of fuel to make a focused and aggressive push. - Hiring the top talent across R&D, sales, and go-to-market to drive awareness, invest in our channel program, and capture market share.
- Continue building on full-stack capabilities below to drive a new blueprint for large and mid-sized enterprises to do cloud networking right (more on this to come).
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A rapidly evolving ecosystem – leading tier-1 service providers, rapid innovation on top of hyper-scaler innovation, NetDevOps-focused partners, and more (look for details in the forthcoming months).
- A staggering number of Fortune 500 companies bet on our technology and solution to accelerate innovation and growth while reaping the full benefits of the cloud.
In Closing…
As we look back, what started as convictions has now come TRUE:
- Building on top of the hyper-scalers is the right approach. Hyper-scalers have moved the needle on the network infrastructure — reach, geo, capacity, capabilities — you name it, they are innovating rapidly. Building on top is the right approach.
- Point capabilities -> Full-stack. What started as key tenants have matured into a comprehensive full-stack – covering all aspects of networking and security, with apps in the center.
- Networking security -> Zero-Trust. It’s not about how you can provide perimeter-based network security (e.g., network firewall) – but how ZTNA (user-to-app) and micro-segmentation (app-to-app) should be deployed without handing traffic to another cloud SaaS provider
- Better decision-making with data. Enterprises are looking for solutions that remove mundane and repetitive tasks (NetDevOps), align business and IT teams, and maximize simplicity while minimizing risk.
- Cloud-aligned consumption model. Enterprises are looking at business and consumption models better aligned with the cloud-based on the number of VPC/VNETs, application end-points, users, etc.
Our industry for too long has accepted the status quo for networking. By thinking differently, we’ve defined and built the gold standard for modern networking in the cloud-focused on outcomes and simplicity. But this is just the beginning – stay tuned for updates on customer adoption and partners who have made a bet on us to win. Please come join us on this journey.