Robin Systems Raises $15M For Its Data-Centric Compute And Storage Containerization Software

Robin Systems, a service that essentially makes it easier for businesses to set up a data-centric, high-performance IT infrastructure, today announced that it has raised a $15 million funding round led by a subsidiary of USAA and DN Capital, with participation from Hasso Plattner Ventures and other existing investors. This round brings Robin Systems’ total funding to $22 million.

In addition, the company also today announced that it has hired Premal Buch, who was previously the VP of software engineering at Altera, as its CEO.

“Improvements in computing technology have enabled the processing of greater data sets in less time, but the technology to enable efficiency of that process has not kept pace with agility demands of today’s businesses,” explains Robin Systems’ Chairman and founding investor Rajeev Madhavan in today’s announcement. “As a result companies are struggling with bloated hardware costs, data and cluster sprawl, and application performance problems. Robin Systems is uniquely positioned to relieve that struggle. We’re excited to have the backing of a diverse group of investors who share our vision for revolutionizing data management.”

The company says its service features “more than a dozen patent-pending innovations” that allow it to provide very high performance operating infrastructures for applications like Spark, Hadoop and modern NoSQL databases. Its platform agnostic service uses a mix of containerization and storage virtualization technologies (on top of SSDs) to achieve what it claims to be a 3x increase in data access compared to similar products at a third of the cost.

I asked Robin Systems CMO Sushil Kumar about how the company is able to achieve these performance gains. “The performance gains are achieved due to Robin’s intelligent host side data acceleration technology which leverage faster storage media like Flash and NVMe [Non-Volatile Memory Express] to accelerate IOs,” he told me. “As a result, data access is accelerated several times as compared to a more traditional IT setup. With our product, customers have been able to speed up their queries by factor of 3x while increasing their data ingestion rate dramatically.”

As a company spokesperson also told me, Robin Systems has built its own virtualized “data lake” service to power all of this.

Kumar tells me Robin Systems will use the new funds to scale up its engineering and sales efforts.