The Khan Brothers who sold Idea to Cisco for $610m

A pair of brothers announced a new startup in San Jose, California on April 14, 2020. The Khan brothers had sold their last company to Cisco Systems Inc in 2017 for $610 million.

CEO Amir Khan and Chief Technology Officer Atif Khan have been working on Alkira Inc for nearly two years.

The multi-cloud networking company is designed to enable cloud architects and network engineers to build and deploy a point and click multi-cloud network in minutes.

It also has the flexibility to turn services on and off as the business requires.

The Khans and their team of more than 50 employees are based near San Jose Mineta International Airport.

They developed their technology after raising approximately $30 million in funding in June 2018, around a month after Alkira was launched.

The money came from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and GV (formerly Google Ventures). Sequoia also led the early stages of Viptela, the company that was purchased by Cisco.

Mamoon Hamid of Kleiner Perkins and Bill Coughran of Sequoia are on Alkira’s board of directors.

CEO Amir Khan said: “We still have runway for at least another year and we have a lot of interest from investors.

“Even in this difficult time, I am still getting multiple inquiries from investors.”

It is important for workers to have an adaptable and secure network for them to work on, especially as they become more mobile and the applications they use sit in different locations.

CTO Atif Khan told Silicon Valley Business Journal:

“Alkira Cloud Services Exchange is the first unified multi-cloud network with an integrated network services marketplace, deep network insights and governance — resiliently delivered on-demand and as-a-service.

“There are many companies trying to solve the same multi-cloud problem that Alkira is tackling, including major networking providers like Cisco and Juniper Networks Inc, major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and some other startups.”

Amir added: “But it is very difficult for companies of major size to quickly pivot and do things completely different in a new area like this.

“The smaller ones may have difficulty delivering what they do on all of the clouds.”

Alkira’s technology is built to connect to its customers’ corporate infrastructure and build and connect to a secure multi-cloud environment in just minutes.

Amir said:

“This provides businesses the agility they need to navigate through volatile market conditions.”

“Anybody who does business in the cloud, or wants to be, will be our customers. It’s a huge market of at least multi-billions of dollars.”

The Khan brothers revealed that they came naturally into their division of labour at Viptela and Alkira.

Amir joked: “He’s my younger brother, so he better respect me.”

Atif added: “He’s got much more knowledge on the business side than me, so we complement each other’s skillsets.”