Why we invested in Volterra

Today our portfolio company Volterra came out of stealth with funding from fellow investors Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Volterra is announcing the launch of VoltStack and VoltMesh, a SaaS-based platform for deploying and operating distributed clouds to enable distributed applications.

While the current era of computing has largely been defined by data moving to centralized public clouds, we see the pendulum swinging back to more applications and services being run locally at edge sites to be closer to data sources, which will optimize application speed, efficiency, and privacy. We will also see more applications deployed across multiple public clouds (aka multi-cloud) to take advantage of best-of-breed cloud services, while also maximizing resiliency.

In this new edge and multi-cloud paradigm, enterprises will need to either transform their IT workforce or look for service providers to apply the distributed cloud infrastructure and operations for managing data and applications spread across the edge and multi-cloud environments.

Telcos face a unique challenge and opportunity here. With 5G on the horizon, they will need to quickly upgrade their own infrastructure and operations while competing for enterprise edge cloud workloads.

We believe Volterra will become a key player during this transition, and that founder Ankur Singla and his team have the right DNA to make this into a reality. The executive team is comprised of experts that have repeatedly built carrier- and enterprise-grade networking and computing infrastructure while at Contrail, Juniper, Alcatel/Lucent, Aruba, and Cisco. With that background, the company is well-positioned to help enterprises and telcos manage the transition to multi-cloud and edge cloud environments.

Volterra’s distributed cloud platform will enable customers to manage a distributed "fleet" of apps, provide the required infrastructure -- including compute, storage, network, security, and orchestration -- as one logical cloud instance, whether deployed across multiple public clouds, data center/private clouds, and/or edge locations.

Congrats to Ankur and his team on coming out of stealth mode. We look forward to supporting them as they help make this new distributed cloud concept a mainstream architecture.

–

To learn more about Volterra, read about the funding on Crunchbase News.