SolidFire, a stealth Atlanta startup building a ‘next-generation’ cloud computing storage platform, has secured $11 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates with current investors Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners participating. This brings the total of capital raised by the company to $12 million.
Not too shabby for a company that can only commit to launching a beta product ‘later this year’. SolidFire will be using the capital to expand in preparation thereof by hiring new people and the opening of an office in Boulder, Colorado.
According to the company, investors were stumbling over each other to get in on the financing deal, which closed way ahead of time, in less than 30 days from start to finish. They won’t discuss the valuation other than that it was ‘very attractive’, though.
Here’s what we know about what they’re building: it will be an enterprise-class cloud storage system that aims to provide reliable, high performance primary storage at low cost for even the most demanding public cloud and enterprise private cloud environments. SolidFire’s solid state architecture is said to enable independent virtualization of both capacity and performance, allowing complete flexibility in cloud-scale storage provisioning and management.
GigaOm has more info.
SolidFire was founded by Dave Wright, who earlier founded Jungle Disk, which leverages Rackspace and Amazon S3 infrastructures to provides reliable, virtually unlimited scalability for any level of data storage. Jungle Disk was acquired by Rackspace in October 2008.
Wright certainly knows his way around complex IT systems. Prior to Jungle Disk, he was Chief Architect at IGN / GameSpy / Fox Interactive Media.
In conjunction with the funding round, NEA General Partner Harry Weller will join SolidFire’s board of directors alongside Valhalla GP Charles Curran, and Novak Biddle GP Phil Bronner. Also joining the SolidFire board is former LeftHand Networks CEO Bill Chambers.
Update: thanks to TechDrawl, a video interview: