Will Coggins, Vice President
Even with the move to the cloud, many enterprise networks are still built on concepts from the datacenter that are no longer relevant – it is time for this to change.
For the last two decades, enterprise networking has been centered on datacenters and their architectures, and the typical enterprise network of just five years ago consists of routers, gateways, firewalls, and switches, most often physical boxes sitting on a rack in the datacenter, linked by physical connections. To support this infrastructure, teams of network engineers spend their time managing applications and networks.
Even for companies that are moving to the cloud, many enterprise networks are still fundamentally built on concepts that are stubbornly stuck in the datacenter era. While physical firewalls and switches from Networking and Network Security companies are being replaced, the enterprise network model is still being used, with analogous virtual appliances in the cloud.
It’s time for a change, and that time is now.
Networks are transforming.
While the first wave of cloud adoption was about moving existing datacenter models into the cloud, the modern enterprise is increasingly building systems around cloud-native concepts like serverless architectures, distributed services, and zero trust. Adopting a cloud model at scale means leaving behind legacy datacenter networking concepts moving toward being truly cloud-native.
Infrastructure teams that handle cloud infrastructure now must manage hundreds of cloud-native networking constructs like VPN, micro-segmentation, and cloud next-gen firewalls, often across multiple cloud providers. The skills and tools that were built to manage datacenter networks are not sufficient for these cloud-native networks as they are often designed around appliances and agents, rather than cloud services and APIs.
This has created enormous strain on infrastructure and security teams who must monitor and manage their increasingly complex networking environments. In addition, these teams must have these teams must have visibility-centered, zero trust networking, augmented by artificial intelligence (AI).
Lumeus.ai is building the zero trust networking platform for the cloud era.
When we first met co-founders Satish Veerapuneni and Saurabh Jain, we were immediately impressed by their customer understanding and technical depth in networking and security. Throughout their time at Intel, Cisco, Fortinet, and other enterprise giants, they were responsible for developing some of the fundamental technologies that define secure networking today. Satish and Saurabh have worked on datacenter and cloud networking technologies like software-defined networking, and next-gen firewalls, as well as critical technologies like Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and Bluetooth, and are now turning their focus to modernizing and securing the enterprise cloud network.
The centerpiece of the Lumeus.ai offering is visibility-first, zero trust networking. They provide customers with AI-generated alerting when there are security or performance issues in their cloud networks, even in complex cloud environments across multiple providers and bring management to multi-cloud networks via their unified policy engine. All of this is accomplished without deploying agents in the endpoint or server environments while leveraging the customer’s existing network infrastructure.
The power and flexibility of this approach gives network engineers and security professionals a much broader scope. With Lumeus.ai, they can see beyond a single context to understand, monitor, and secure the entire network using AI, no matter the cloud service. Infrastructure and security teams can now focus on modernization and evolution, rather than simply catching up to their expanding cloud estate.
We are thrilled to partner with Lumeus.ai.
We are excited to announce our lead investment in Lumeus.ai’s $6M seed round, with participation from existing investors Emergent Ventures and First Rays Ventures. This team is building the future of zero trust networking for the cloud era, and we are thrilled to be a part of that journey as they launch their product and scale their go-to-market efforts.