Alkira built the network for multi-cloud. Now it becomes the network for the AI era.

Today, Alkira agreed to be acquired by Lumen Technologies to provide the network foundation for the AI era.

In 2018, Amir and Atif Khan set out to solve networking for businesses running workloads across multiple clouds. This wasn’t their first rodeo. At Viptela, their prior company, they took the sprawling chaos of branch networking and collapsed it into one elegant, centralized platform — SD‑WAN — which Cisco acquired in 2017.

But Amir and Atif weren’t finished. They saw the same problem one layer up: enterprises were racing to multiple clouds, and nobody had solved the network. We co‑led the Series A in 2018 when Alkira was just that idea. What they built was a platform that unifies the multi‑cloud network and can be deployed in under an hour.

As AI workloads have moved from experiment to core infrastructure, the network has become the critical path. Data has to move. Models have to train. Pipelines have to run. Securely, reliably, across clouds, at scale. That’s exactly what Alkira enables.

And that’s exactly where Lumen comes in.

Lumen operates one of the largest fiber networks in the world, has deep enterprise relationships, and serves a customer base now wrestling with AI at scale. What they’ve been missing is a modern software layer — a way to deliver cloud‑native networking without the complexity. Alkira fills that gap.

Together, they can offer something neither could alone: the physical reach of a tier‑one global network combined with the simplicity of a cloud‑native platform. For Lumen, this is a meaningful step in their transformation from legacy telecom to infrastructure for the AI era.

This is Amir and Atif’s second great company. The first found its home at Cisco. This one finds its home at Lumen. In both cases, the outcome reflects something simple: they built what customers needed, when the market was ready.

Congratulations to Amir, Atif, and the entire Alkira team.