Akamai Acquires Soha Systems
Today, Akamai Technologies announced the acquisition of Soha Systems in an all-cash transaction. Details of the acquisition can be found in Akamai’s press release here.
Menlo Ventures was the sole lead investor in Soha’s Series A round of funding in May 2014. Previously, the Menlo Talent Fund was an investor in the company’s seed round which closed June 2013.
Why did we make this investment?
Firstly, Soha was started by an amazing founding team led by CEO Haseeb Budhani and VP Engineering Hemanth Kavuluru. Senior team members were leaders in Silicon Valley’s most successful networking and access companies including Cisco, Citrix, Riverbed, MobileIron, and ThreatMetrix. Additionally, we were strong supporters of the company’s mission to move enterprise access from hardware boxes in a data center to secure access delivered as a service in the cloud. Soha achieved considerable success with this initial service which was honored by Gartner in 2016 as a Cool Vendor in Cloud and Emerging Security Technology.
The combination of Soha’s secure cloud access with Akamai’s Content Delivery Network is a very powerful construct. Customers will be able to secure, provision, and accelerate corporate applications that run on computers and mobile devices around the world, all through the use of cloud services.
Menlo actively invests in innovative companies that enable corporate customers to fully utilize cloud computing and storage services. Other enterprise cloud investments include Appdome, Avere Systems, AVI Networks, and Usermind.
