Alkira
Alkira cofounders Amir Khan (left) and Atif Khan.
- Alkira, a startup that helps other companies manage multiple cloud services, announced $21.5 million in Series A funding on Tuesday. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round.
- Alkira cofounder and CEO Amir Khan has nearly 30 years of experience in the tech industry and has worked for past networking giants like Cisco and Nortel.
- He told Business Insider his past experience working in tech during the downturn has helped him develop an incredibly efficient business model for Alkira that can withstand, and even thrive, during periods of economic uncertainty.
- Kleiner Perkins general partner Mamoon Hamid told Business Insider that the fundraising landscape hasn't changed entirely, but serendipitous meetings between founders and funders are less likely to happen during the lockdown, and could impact deal flow in the longer term.
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Mamoon Hamid, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, met Amir Khan at an event several years ago where the two enterprise technology veterans hit it off. It's the kind of serendipitous meeting that has been rendered obsolete by the coronavirus, and an entire generation of founders could be missing out.
Khan's startup Alkira helps other companies manage multiple cloud providers and services, and announced its $21.5 million Series A funding round on Tuesday. Kleiner co-led the deal with Sequoia Capital, another blue-chip tech venture firm in Silicon Valley. Hamid will join the startup's board.
Although the fundraising talks have been in the works for months, Khan was at an advantage for winning over some of the biggest names on Sand Hill Road, the home of Silicon Valley's many venture firms. Having known Hamid and others from a nearly three-decade career in networking technology, Khan was already familiar with the names and faces that have come to define venture capital in the last decade.
"Just like many companies we invest in, there's either a founder you worked with before when they were an executive at a company or you came in touch to try and recruit them to a portfolio company," Hamid told Business Insider. "There are many touchpoints before you invest in the company, and in our prior world that was mostly face to face. The current environment changes that quite a bit. The first time we met Amir was at an event, and that's just not happening right now."
Alkira tops off an already impressive career for Khan, who has worked for networking giants like Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Nortel in high-level positions over the last 30 years. Although he has worked in tech during other times of economic uncertainty, it never felt as high-stakes as launching a company during a global pandemic.
"Once you come up with a strategy, you do enough due diligence upfront to identify the problem set and solution. For an early startup, you cannot afford to change those things," Khan told Business Insider. "Fortunately, we developed a solution that is very applicable right now."
That helped win over the brand name VCs, Khan said. The solution he describes is a plug-and-play management tool for technical teams working with multiple cloud providers such as Google Cloud or Amazon AWS. The migration to the cloud might feel like a stale topic to some in Silicon Valley, but it is still top of mind for a vast majority of major businesses that are just starting to evaluate the strategy. Now, those evaluations are accelerated by a sudden shift to remote work, and immediate needs for cost reduction.
"Things are moving much more quickly," Khan said. "It's very relevant for any business, like healthcare, that has a need to deploy more resources across any region. They need flexibility, and our solution provides that."
Khan said he has been able to leverage his own networks in conjunction with those from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia to form a broad customer network that will help the early startup weather any changes to the markets that could spell disaster for other similarly aged companies. By adhering to the old Silicon Valley adage "listen to your customer," he believes he has built a resilient and capable company that will operate at peak efficiency regardless of the economic climate.
That hasn't insulated the company entirely from challenges like freezing hiring or adjusting timelines, Khan said. He has had to consider and implement changes across the board to make sure Alkira is set up for success in the long term as winning new customers becomes more difficult and in-person meetings are routinely delayed. But the need for efficient computing has only become more important, Hamid said.
"You have seen the tweets asking for COBOL programmers - that stuff should have been programmed to run to a cloud-based app a long time ago," Hamid said. "Government needs to move to the cloud, and a company like Alkira is an enabler to that. The ones that are doing really well right now have made these shifts, and that's what is allowing them to keep everything running."