Graphiant is a company that provides a “Network-as-a-Service” (NaaS) platform that combines the high performance of private networks with the flexibility of the internet, offering faster, more secure, and cost-effective enterprise connectivity compared to traditional MPLS or SD-WAN. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Graphiant’s new CEO, Ali Shaikh, to learn more.
Arriving At Graphiant
Congratulations on your appointment as CEO. What drew you to Graphiant at this particular moment in your career? Shaikh said:
“Thank you! I’ve been with Graphiant since its very founding and have had multiple roles over the years. It was an honor and very exciting for me that Khalid Raza, our founder, and the Board of Directors appointed me to lead the company. It is an extremely exciting time to be in the space of building infrastructure for AI. We don’t know yet all that will come from AI and where value will be created, but what we do know is that the infrastructure has to be built smarter and that networks must be more service-oriented than ever before.”
Immediate Priorities
How would you describe your immediate priorities in your first 100 days leading the company? Shaikh shared:
“My first 100 days focused on our strategic plan for 2026-2027. This represented three major elements:
(a) Truly adopt AI first methodology across the organization with deliberate gains in productivity. This was achieved at all levels of the company, with engineers reporting quantifiable leaps in development. We saw it rapidly take over a multitude of back-office functions and streamline processes.
(b) Advance the reach of Graphiant as an organization. We were historically secretive about the uniqueness of our technological capabilities. It was time to move more so into the public domain, with a boldness to showcase our capabilities and challenge those who would copy us to try.
(c) Focus on the right kinds of customers to grow our revenue. We are moving from the early stage into a growth stage. Our technology services demonstrate maturity and stability along with delivering on all the promises. We have had customers on our platform for years. Now is the time to begin the rapid commercial acceleration; deployment of our technology into service providers in the US, in Europe as we see connectivity essential to winning the AI race.
My priorities looking ahead are focusing on Graphiant’s sales and marketing, driving business partnerships as our innovation continues to move alongside the AI infrastructure build-out worldwide.”
Biggest Opportunities
Graphiant operates in a rapidly evolving networking landscape. What do you see as the biggest opportunities for the company in the next few years? Shaikh cited:
“The biggest opportunities will come from AI space. Data centers are all over the map, the clouds are delivering new applications, and the businesses are finding that the level of complexity is growing too fast to insource all functions. The continued expansion of use-cases with AI leads to the conclusion that all these data centers need, in addition to power and cooling, reliable connectivity. This connectivity must be a service for those who do not specialize in global connectivity. Graphiant will see customers as well as partners looking for a programmable service that consistently can connect them to anywhere the data is.”
Capitalizing On Trends
The enterprise networking market is seeing increased interest in cloud-native and AI-driven infrastructure. How is Graphiant positioned to capitalize on these trends? Shaikh explained:
“Graphiant is a fully agentic platform. We provide pre-built agents, provide libraries on creating your agents, and use OpenClaw to build networks on behalf of special projects. We always want to provide a solution that is more than a chat prompt. We provide an agentic service that understands the network, can do more than just look at charts, can have the agency to be a participant in your meetings and act. What action can’t it take? In the world of AI, the most significant thing will be the need to create secure data relationships. I believe that businesses will want an “app store” experience and the ability to in a controlled fashion deliver AI service that has intelligence, context and compliance built into the fabric itself.”
Differentiating The Offering
Graphiant has been recognized for its Network-as-a-Service model. How do you plan to further differentiate that offering from traditional SD-WAN or cloud networking competitors? Shaikh emphasized:
“Graphiant NaaS is an evergreen service evolution. The fundamental truism for us is that what was historically gated behind software licenses is being rapidly commoditized. We started with eliminating the site level licenses of SDWAN. Then we progressed to embedding SASE within the data fabric to deliver all the SASE cybersecurity capabilities natively in the platform at no cost. The true differentiation for us lies in the fact that networks must become increasingly ephemeral, where agents can build topologies in a pub/sub style model so that networks are fully on-demand. That is where the differentiation and value creation lies ahead.”
Balance Continued Innovation With Operational Efficiency
How do you plan to balance continued innovation with the need for operational efficiency and scalability? Shaikh noted:
“At Graphiant, having taken first the SRE path and then the AI path as a core function has allowed us to innovate, build and support technology in a manner that needs a 1/4th of the number of people. This is driven by having innovation and creativity be the realm of an incredibly talented set of individuals while the operational element moves to a more engaged governance style model, and automation and agents handle efficiency. This is evident in how we continue to rapidly deliver capabilities like Post-Quantum Cryptographic support, onboarding new New-Clouds like GCore while supporting customers consuming 100s of GBps of capacity on top of our services built using Equinix, Packetfabric, Megaport, AT&T, Lumen, Vodafone, Colt and NTT.”
Relationships With Customers, Partners, And Investors
Can you share any insights into how Graphiant’s relationships with customers, partners, or investors might evolve under your leadership? Shaikh pointed out:
“Just as AI is growing fast, our relationships with customers, partners, investors, and beyond all showcase one thing: that we are all aligned in helping to enable AI in this fast AI-driven world. I’m very excited that others understand Graphiant’s vision in being the fundamental building block for AI. The thing that customers, partners, investors should expect is an inherent nimbleness. Technology can change, business models can change, there is nothing that we are unwilling to modify so long as we remain true to the philosophical belief that the future requires an infrastructure that is directly programmable (not config automation wrapped) by AI.”
Network Security
The networking industry is becoming increasingly intertwined with cybersecurity. How does Graphiant’s platform approach network security, and where do you see room for growth? Shaikh described:
“At Graphiant, we recognize that cybersecurity is a constant arms race where the nature of threats evolves rapidly. We also see that cybersecurity, especially in nfrastructure should be seen as a common good i.e. we need the services we provide to be clean and healthy. I draw the analogy of tap water; I pay for the utility of water, but I expect it to be safe, without having to pay for securing each drop. This is why at Graphiant, we embedded SASE within the Graphiant Network as a Service (NaaS) data fabric to provide the cybersecurity that our customers must have without charging them for it. As things continue to evolve, we will add more capabilities by partnering with threat systems, risk systems, deep fake analysis tools and more, but we remain committed to providing security as a common good; at no charge.”
Leadership Principles
What leadership principles or philosophies guide your approach to building teams and driving culture? Shaikh revealed:
“I believe simplicity is key. In conversations, how we build things with the customer’s pain points in mind, simplicity helps us align together so that we can work towards a common goal.”
What Success Looks Like
Looking ahead, what does success look like for Graphiant in the next 12 to 24 months — and how will you measure it? Shaikh concluded:
“For Graphiant, the success measure will be how many agents use Graphiant MCP to build dynamic on demand networks. The future is agentic, and we want to see increasingly agents building networks on behalf of network operators.”
