Highway 9 Networks Pitches Enterprise Mobile Cloud, Raises $25 Million

Highway 9 Networks has emerged from stealth with a SaaS-driven private mobile network offering designed to merge 5G mobile networking with more traditional enterprise networking. The company has raised a little over $25 million in funding from investors including Mayfield, General Catalyst and Detroit Ventures to build out its vision.

In what it is calling a “mobile cloud for enterprises”, Highway 9 has joined several maturing technologies together to provide a more integrated experience for enterprises. The proliferation of sensors and IoT devices on corporate campuses—particularly in manufacturing—is pushing the boundaries of what regular WiFi networks can handle. Simultaneously, newer-model end-user devices such as phones and tablets can support technologies like 5G and eSIMs that enable new approaches like that of Highway 9.

“A common theme that we kept hearing is that most of the enterprise customers are moving to mobile,” said Allwyn Sequeira, CEO and co-founder of Highway 9 Networks. “We said ‘Why don’t we create a mobile cloud to bring together the mobile clients plus the access to the data centre, which in turn goes to public cloud, the Internet, enterprise intranet, plus all these AI and automation devices?’”

With what is essentially a private enterprise cellular provider, Highway 9’s software stitches together an enterprise-wide network that joins mobile devices with the existing LAN, but with enhanced security and monitoring. Enterprise networking teams can use Highway 9’s system as one part of their network stack, using familiar tools for managing network flows, security, and monitoring. By merging network operations in this way, Highway 9 sees a strong market in enterprises that want the features and functions of 5G but don’t want to build yet another parallel technology stack disconnected from everything else.

Sequeira hopes to make cellular networking as familiar to enterprises as WiFi networking is today, bringing across the benefits that are currently enjoyed by telecommunications providers but few others. Features such as network function virtualization, low-latency connectivity, and fine-grained security are more popular in telco environments where distributed deployments at scale are more common. As enterprises embrace AI-enabled workloads more, the need for techniques well-established in telcos become more pressing. Enterprises are increasingly embracing cloud-like operations for their data center workloads and Highway 9 believes they’ll want something similar for their mobile workloads.

“That’s why we look at this as a cloud, which includes the networking layer, which includes the control plane. It’s a place where compute and storage come together in a cohesive orchestrated fashion,” said Sequeira.

Joining together what have traditionally been distinct kinds of infrastructure is a complex undertaking. This is part of Highway 9’s appeal; it has done the hard work so that enterprises don’t need to build it themselves. But it’s also a complex thing to communicate, and without a clear, concrete, and compelling reason to adopt the technology, enterprises need to buy in to the broader vision.

For certain kinds of customers, such as high-tech manufacturers that have adopted networked automation with gusto, Highway 9 has some clear appeal. Those struggling with large-scale WiFi deployments may also see a clear benefit to going cellular instead. Yet here Highway 9 is competing with other providers of private 5G networks, of which there are many.

Highway 9’s unifying vision is novel—let’s be fair—and I can see situations where it might make sense, but the devil is in the details. Here, the details work against Highway 9 as it tells a complex story of many components all joining together. It’s a challenge to figure out if there’s a pathway from here to the promised future state that delivers substantial value each step of the way. It’s a further challenge to understand why this approach, and not several others, makes the most sense.

Highway 9 needs a killer app if it wants enterprises to adopt the mobile cloud moniker. When AWS launched its Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006, each focused on serving an existing need in a new way, and made it very obvious what it was for. The network required to connect to each service—the Internet—was unreliable and relatively low-performance, but it didn’t matter to the customers that adopted AWS in droves. What was offered was clear, concrete, and compelling.

For me, for now, that part of Highway 9’s story remains obscured by cloud.