Another big round of funding for an enterprise startup that only exited stealth mode a year ago. Pure Storage, a flash enterprise storage company, today announced that it has picked up another $40 million in funding led by Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. Pure Storage has confirmed that Diane Greene, co-founder and former CEO of VMWare, also invested in this apparently oversubscribed Series D round. The total now raised by Pure Storage since being founded in 2009 is now $95 million.
The company says that this latest round will be used to beef up business development, specifically expanding operations to Europe with channel partners, as well as invest in more sales and engineering talent. Volpi, whose past, pre-VC roles included senior roles at Cisco, also becomes a strategic advisor as well as member of the board of directors.
Pure Storage says it has shipped more than 100 of its FlashArray devices to customers since opening for business last year. It most recently had raised $28 million in June 2011.
Pure Storage’s main product is FlashArray, a storage device that uses consumer-grade flash memory to deliver high availability, enterprise-grade storage. This is something that in the past had been considered a pricier option, but Pure has developed it into a product that is competitive with — and even cheaper, it claims — the price of traditional memory products. Volpi has put money down on this becuase he believes flash storage will become the primary way of accessing memory in the future:
“The advent of solid state memory technology as a mainstream, enterprise-class storage solution represents one of the most disruptive changes that the industry will see in a decade,” he said in a statement. “We are confident that Pure Storage represents exactly such an industry-defining company.”
The product integrates with systems from VMWare, Oracle, SQLServer and VDI.
With competitors like EMC and Virident also vying for the same business as Pure Storage, the company is doubling down to make sure it stays on procurement lists as companies continue to make more flash storage purchases. “When we emerged one year ago as a pioneer in the all-flash storage category, few believed that we could deliver the benefits of all-flash below the price point of mechanical disk. Today, we remain the only vendor providing sub-millisecond, inline data deduplication and compression, and yet it is a must have for cost-effective flash storage,” Scott Dietzen, CEO at Pure Storage, said in a statement. “The key now is to have access to the working capital to get this technology into the hands of the customers and partners that are screaming for it.”
Pure Storage is pioneering a new class of enterprise storage that has been designed from the ground up to take full advantage of flash memory. The company’s products accelerate random I/O-intensive applications like server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, rich analytics/OLAP, SQL, NoSQL) and cloud computing. Pure Storage makes it cost effective to broadly deploy flash within the data center, enabling organizations to manage growth within existing power and space constraints. Launching later this year, the company’s products...
Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm specializing in investments in information technology and life sciences companies. The firm invests in seed, early and growth stage start-ups across US and Europe. Since its inception in 1996, Index Ventures has backed visionary entrepreneurs who have taken on incumbents and built seminal companies in a number of growth sectors including: open source software companies such as MySQL, Trolltech, Zend and Pentaho; broadband and VOIP companies such as Virata, Skype, FON and...
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events. Such companies include Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Tellabs,...
Redpoint Ventures has helped entrepreneurs build innovative businesses that defy convention, shape the future, and change the world. From early investments in industry pioneers like Netflix, TiVo, and Juniper to companies such as Right Media, Zimbra, Heroku, LifeSize, Danger, Fortinet, and Pinwheel, we stand behind our entrepreneurs helping them go all the way to the top. With our deep experience and focus on quality, we offer entrepreneurs a culture and approach that values mutual respect, meaningful relationships, and...
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