Seattle-based enterprise data storage startup Qumulo, which was only founded back in March and has been in a quasi-stealthy state ever since, has raised its voice to announce a $24.5 million Series A financing round today, led by Highland Capital Partners. Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners are also participating in the round — Valhalla having previously contributed seed funding for the startup.
The Series A funding will be used for product development and to “substantially grow” its Seattle-based engineering and leadership teams, the startup said. As part of the investment from Highland Capital Partners, Peter Bell, general partner, joins Qumulo’s board of directors.
Qumulo, which was founded by engineering veterans from Isilon and architects of the Isilon OneFS distributed file system, says its technology aims to solve the “manageability, scalability and efficiency problems that plague the $35 billion enterprise data storage market”. It sees a massive opportunity in the vast quantities of data enterprise IT is having to deal with, coupled with the storage challenges and complexities created by virtualised workloads.
“Qumulo’s team of enterprise storage experts is positioned to solve the problems introduced by the confluence of three huge trends in enterprise IT — consumerization, SSD technology, and commoditization,” said Charles Curran, general partner at Valhalla Partners, in a statement. “The next five years will bring a variety of new approaches to deal with the massive explosion of data and its manageability, and Qumulo will be at the forefront of that revolution.”
“A new category of storage is needed to manage the proliferation of data that enterprises face,” added Highland Capital Partners’ Bell in a statement. “Data that doubles every two years, a growing scarcity of storage administrators, and the advent of shared, virtualized environments put tremendous pressure on storage systems. Qumulo has the right strategy and team to drive a leadership position in the market.”
Release follows below
SEATTLE, WA–(Marketwire – Nov 20, 2012) – Qumulo, an enterprise data storage company, today announced it has raised $24.5 million in a Series A round of financing led by Highland Capital Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners. Founded in March 2012 with seed funding from Valhalla Partners, Qumulo is solving the manageability, scalability and efficiency problems that plague the $35 billion enterprise data storage market. The company will use the funding for product development and to substantially grow its Seattle-based engineering and leadership teams. As part of the investment, Peter Bell, general partner at Highland Capital Partners, joins the board of directors.
Data growth, application requirements, and technology shifts are disrupting enterprise data storage. End-users double the amount of data they store every two years, creating enormous manageability and efficiency problems for enterprise IT. At the same time, virtualized workloads create random access patterns that place tremendous stress on traditional storage systems. To meet these challenges, application owners and IT operations managers increasingly demand rapid innovation, operational scale and administrative productivity.
Qumulo is poised to address these pain points based on its executive team’s deep experience in the enterprise storage market. The company was co-founded by the primary architects of Isilon’s OneFS file system, which revolutionized the way data centers store and manage petabytes of data. Isilon was acquired by EMC in 2010 for $2.25 billion. Qumulo CEO Peter Godman was the former director of software engineering at Isilon and previous CEO of Corensic. He is joined by Qumulo CTO Aaron Passey, former chief architect at Isilon and CTO at Clustrix, and Vice President of Engineering Neal Fachan, previously a distinguished engineer at Isilon and principal engineer at Amazon. Rounding out the Qumulo executive team is Vice President of Product Management Jeff Cobb, who previously served as chief scientist at Wily Technology (now part of CA) and senior vice president strategy at CA.
“A new category of storage is needed to manage the proliferation of data that enterprises face,” said Peter Bell, general partner at Highland Capital Partners. “Data that doubles every two years, a growing scarcity of storage administrators, and the advent of shared, virtualized environments put tremendous pressure on storage systems. Qumulo has the right strategy and team to drive a leadership position in the market.”
“Based on our previous work with Qumulo’s executive team and their track record of success, we believe the company has the ideal foundation to create the next disruptive storage solution for enterprise IT,” said Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. “We have been closely involved with Isilon Systems and Amazon, two hugely influential companies in the storage space, and believe Qumulo will fuel further innovation in the market.”
“Qumulo’s team of enterprise storage experts is positioned to solve the problems introduced by the confluence of three huge trends in enterprise IT — consumerization, SSD technology, and commoditization,” said Charles Curran, general partner at Valhalla Partners. “The next five years will bring a variety of new approaches to deal with the massive explosion of data and its manageability, and Qumulo will be at the forefront of that revolution.”
“This funding round provides us with expert guidance from storage investors Peter Bell and Matt McIlwain and sets the stage for a rapid growth trajectory,” said Peter Godman, CEO of Qumulo. “The combined insight and collective wisdom of our investors will accelerate our vision for the future of data storage.”
About Qumulo
Qumulo is a privately held enterprise data storage company based in Seattle. The company was founded in 2012 by Peter Godman, Aaron Passey, and Neal Fachan, engineering veterans from Isilon and architects of the Isilon OneFS distributed file system. Qumulo is backed by venture capital firms Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners. For more information, please visit www.qumulo.com.About Highland Capital Partners
Founded in 1988, Highland Capital Partners is a global venture capital firm focused on putting the entrepreneur first. With over $3 billion of committed capital and offices in Menlo Park, Cambridge, Geneva, London and Shanghai, Highland has invested in more than 225 companies, resulting in category-defining businesses across Mobile, Consumer Internet and Enterprise technology. Investments include 2U, Ask Jeeves, Bromium, Calxeda, Leap Motion, LevelUp, Lycos, MapQuest, Nebula, QD Vision, Qihoo 360, Quattro Wireless, RentJuice, Rent the Runway, Sybase, Violin Memory, VistaPrint and WePay. Highland also serves as a mentor for future entrepreneurs through Summer@HIGHLAND, a program that provides students and university-affiliated startups with the environment and resources to take their initiative to the next level. For more information, visitwww.hcp.com.About Madrona Venture Group
Madrona has been investing in early-stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest since 1995 and has been privileged to play a role in some of the region’s most successful technology ventures. The firm invests predominately in seed and Series A rounds across the information technology spectrum including consumer Internet, commercial software and services, digital media and advertising, networking and cloud computing, and mobile. Madrona manages nearly $1 billion and was an early investor in companies such as Amazon.com, Isilon Systems, Farecast.com, Sharebuilder, and Apptio. www.madrona.comAbout Valhalla Partners
Valhalla Partners is a trusted partner and advisor to technology entrepreneurs in their quest to build world-class companies. Based in Vienna, Virginia, the firm’s management team has made more than 120 investments over the past twenty years and produced almost $1 billion of investment proceeds. Valhalla prefers investments where the mission of the company is to innovate, challenge and fundamentally change the dynamics of new and existing markets. Investments by Valhalla’s team include Advertising.com, AvailTVN, JumpTap, LeftHand Networks, Nirvanix, Progress Software, Proxicom, RealOps, Register.com, Riverbed Technologies, SafeNet, ServiceBench, SolidFire, TidalTV, Trilogy, and webMethods. Valhalla Partners brings the full power and network of its experienced team to every investment it makes, helping companies grow faster and smarter regardless of size or maturity.
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