VeloCloud Networks Inc., the Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN company, today announced that it has closed $27 million in Series C financing led by venture fund March Capital Partners and two additional strategic investors, including Cisco Investments. Existing investors, including New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Venrock, also participated in the round. The funding will be used to expand business operations as the company accelerates new product development and customer rollouts, and ramps up sales and marketing in expanded theaters to meet growing global demand. Today's funding brings the company's total funding to $49 million. 

Gartner, a research and advisory firm, has estimated that by the end of 2019, 30 percent of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in all their branches, up from less than 1 percent today. 

"VeloCloud has already established itself as a SD-WAN leader and secured an impressive array of customer and ecosystem partners," said Sumant Mandal, General Partner, March Capital Partners. "We see a rare, tremendous growth opportunity for SD-WAN in the next few years and strongly believe that VeloCloud, with its unique Cloud-Delivered strategy, is best positioned for great success in this burgeoning category."

With the rampant growth of branch office deployments and rapid migration to cloud applications, the industry is seeing an increasing need for advanced wide area network (WAN) service delivery, and assured performance of cloud and enterprise applications. In 2015 VeloCloud saw rapid adoption of its SD-WAN solution fueled, in part, by a significantly expanded partner ecosystem which now includes BroadSoft, Cisco, Equinix, HP, IIx Console, Intel, VMware, Websense and Zscaler.

"We are seeing exploding growth in global demand for VeloCloud's Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN solutions," said VeloCloud CEO and Co-founder Sanjay Uppal. "This new financing validates our unique cloud-delivered direction and success, and will accelerate growth in our core business of providing simplified branch WAN networking, improved performance and service delivery to mid to large enterprises and service providers."

"As a leading provider of WAN solutions for enterprises worldwide, we are collaborating closely with customers looking to transition to software-driven WAN deployments with our Cisco Intelligent WAN solution," said Jeff Reed, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Infrastructure and Solutions Group at Cisco. "Cisco is committed to open networking, and interoperability with the VeloCloud solution will provide our joint customers with additional enhancements for application and cloud services performance."

VeloCloud solutions enable enterprises to rapidly, seamlessly and economically expand their wide area networks to support application growth, network agility and simplified branch implementations, while delivering optimized access to cloud datacenters and applications.