Levyx Raises $5.4 Million

Levyx Inc., whose high-performance processing technology dramatically reduces infrastructure costs associated with big-data applications, announced the closing of a $5.4 million Series A round led by Chicago-based OCA Ventures.

Additional investors include Palo Alto, CA-based Amino Capital (a.k.a. zPark Capital) and Sumavision USA Corporation, as well as individual executives from leading technology companies like EMC Corp. and SAP SE.

Levyx’s flagship data engine, Helium, is built for the modern open-platform commodity-hardware datacenter. Bridging the gap between high-performance big-data software and common hardware storage solutions, Helium allows the latest developments in both areas to be fully exploited, thereby creating breakthrough performance at the application level and dramatically shrinking the amount of required supporting infrastructure and resources.
 
“We have seen a huge amount of innovation in the software and storage hardware associated with big-data applications, but there are big inefficiencies because the two sides have been walled off from one another,” CEO and founder Reza Sadri said. “By fixing this disconnect with a fundamentally new software stack, we pave the way for real-time processing of big-data workloads for the masses. The support and guidance of investors like OCA Ventures, Amino Capital and Sumavision will help us in our quest to make big-data applications dramatically more affordable for everyone.”
 
Ian Drury, General Partner, OCA Ventures, added: “Levyx’s technology is truly transformative, with the ability to boost the performance of a broad set of popular databases. We look forward to playing our part in the team’s success as Levyx becomes the go-to performance engine for anyone building enterprise applications, systems and appliances targeted at big data.”
 
Helium is a low latency datastore that can process tens of millions of queries per second on a single computing node. By leveraging Helium and its core expertise system software and SSD/NVM technology, Levyx enables its customers to achieve in-memory computing performance at a fraction of the normal cost by using flash-SSDs (versus much more expensive DRAM) and running on commodity hardware. Levyx’s patent-pending Input/Output software and indexing algorithms take advantage of multicore architectures and flash memory and is also designed to optimize emerging NVM technologies.
 
Furthermore, Levyx has integrated Helium into Apache Spark to create a flash – and NVM – optimized distribution of Spark called LevyxSpark. In a nutshell, LevyxSpark runs complex/large queries (e.g., shuffle) directly on flash, which permits much smaller clusters with performance comparable to in-memory execution.
 
The funds raised will accelerate Levyx’s product development and expand its sales and marketing resources to proliferate its solutions. Having achieved its first major enterprise customer last year, Levyx markets its Helium data-processing engine to OEMs and enterprise software companies, and its Apache Spark offering, LevyxSpark, directly to end-customers.
 
Levyx’s enterprise software provides fast and scalable data access for high-speed analytics, machine learning, and other real-time big-data applications in industries such as cyber-security, financial services, government and defense, social networking, biotech and healthcare, digital advertising, and e-commerce.  
 
Levyx was founded in 2013 by Sadri and Tony Givargis, who serve as CEO and CTO, respectively. The management team is rounded out by COO Luis Morales.