PernixData Raises $35 Million in Series C, Total Reaching $62 Million

It’s rare to receive a press release that we can publish like that, with few corrections, and including a lot of information, consequently deserving our Today’s Top News . Ed.

PernixData, Inc. has raised $35 million in Series C funding.

Menlo Ventures led the oversubscribed round, which also included new individual investments from Marc Benioff (chairman and CEO of salesforce.com), Jim Davidson (co-founder, managing partner and MD, Silver Lake), and Steve Luczo (chairman and CEO of Seagate Technology).

Previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Lightspeed Ventures, Lane Bess, Mark Leslie and John Thompson also contributed to the Series C round, which now brings the total investment in the company to $62 million.

On July 31, 2014 PernixData also closed its first full fiscal year, which had 42% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth.

“PernixData has experienced an absolutely amazing year with groundbreaking product features, 160% growth in worldwide headcount, extensive industry accolades, top tier funding, and revenues that were 50% higher than any other enterprise software company during its first year of sales, handily beating the previous record in this space,” said Poojan Kumar, CEO and co-founder, PernixData. “This underscores the enormous demand for our unique decoupled storage architecture. We will use this revenue momentum and the new round of funding to execute on our next phase of product vision and deliver FVP globally to all virtualized data centers.”

“We are witnessing a fundamental shift in storage design where performance is decoupled from capacity using PernixData FVP software and server side flash,” said Luczo. “This brings unparalleled performance and scalability to virtualized applications, and makes flash technology a strategic component of tomorrow’s software defined data center.”

“The initial journey to virtualization took many years and resulted in a fundamental shift in data center design and operations,” said John W. Thompson, CEO, Virtual Instruments, and chairman, Microsoft. “It is really exciting to see this next phase of acceleration as more companies of all sizes embrace the unique technology of PernixData to improve overall application performance in their software defined data centers.”

PernixData is changing how storage is designed and operated in virtual data centers. The company’s product FVP software, virtualizes server flash and RAM to enable scale-out storage performance that is independent of capacity. No changes are required to VMs, servers or primary storage, ensuring maximum performance of all virtualized applications in a seamless, scalable and cost-effective manner.

PernixData first began shipping FVP software in August of 2013. The product established itself as the premier platform for storage acceleration with features like write acceleration, clustering, and installation within the hypervisor. In April 2014, FVP also became the first acceleration solution to run on both flash and RAM, and to support any file, block or DAS.

Today, FVP is estimated to be accelerating approximately 120,000 virtual workloads worldwide.

PernixData has sold FVP software to approximately 200 companies in over 20 countries, ranging from two to 300+ node deployments. Customers range from small businesses to large enterprises and global service providers, including names like Tata Steel, Bank of the West, Virtustream, Sega, Toyota and more.

Approximately 20% of FVP customers made follow-on software purchases during the company’s first fiscal year, with the average follow-on order being twice the original (and typically taking less than three months to complete).

PernixData was distinguished this past year with seventeen industry awards. Specific accolades include two Best New Technology awards at VMworld 2013, Forbes Most Promising Company, Gartner 2014 Cool vendor in Storage, and Infoworld Product of the Year.

PernixData has signed almost 250 resellers worldwide in approximately 40 countries. In addition, the company has a global resale agreement in place with Dell. On the technology side, the company introduced the PernixDrive program to accelerate the adoption of decoupled software, which has led to various partnerships with leading flash vendors like HGST, Intel, Kingston, Micron, SanDisk, Toshiba, and more.

New Team Members
As part of this announcement, Mark Siegel, MD at Menlo Ventures, has joined the PernixData board in an advisory role. His investments and board seats include Dropcam, Dstillery, eXelate, Getaround, Invidi, Pluribus Networks, Tintri and Voltage Security. Some of his previous board seats include 3PAR (acquired by HP), Pliant Technology (acquired by SanDisk), RNA Networks (acquired by Dell), BlueGill Technologies (acquired by Checkfree), and Rubric (acquired by Broadbase).

“PernixData FVP is a critical component of the software defined data center,” said Mark Siegel, MD, Menlo Ventures. “It brings a new level of value to the hypervisor, making virtualization even more strategic to every company’s application, storage and networking plans.”

 PernixData has also expanded its executive team with the hiring of Mike Arterbury as VP of business development. He comes from Dell, where he most recently served as GM of the software and peripherals group. In his role at PernixData, he will be responsible for creating and nurturing go-to-market programs with various technology partners.