Pivot3 Closes $12 Million Additional Funding

Pivot3, Inc. has closed a $12-million funding round that will drive additional product development and accelerate the company’s growth.

The round, led by new investor S3 Ventures of Austin, TX also included participation by current investors, InterWest Partners and Mesirow Financial Capital Partners.

“Pivot3 products leverage innovative technology to solve important business problems in large markets. The company’s growth is impressive, their customer references are excellent and their potential is unlimited,” said Brian R. Smith, MD, S3 Ventures, who has also joined the board of directors.

In purpose-built, hyper-converged infrastructure appliances for the video surveillance, VDI and data center markets, Pivot3 pioneered converging shared storage, networking and servers through patented software.

The new funding round follows the recent release of Pivot3 vSTAC OS 6.5, an update to the OS of its vSTAC suite of technologies that improves performance and enhances operational simplicity. Overall, the vSTAC family of purpose-built, hyper-converged storage and processing appliances deliver scalability and savings to huge, petabyte-sized video surveillance solutions and to VMware-based Horizon virtual desktop deployments.

Pivot3’s hyper-converged infrastructure is installed in more than 1,000 customer locations around the world.

“We are excited that S3 Ventures has joined us and that Brian has joined our board. He is an experienced and successful operations executive, and his advice will be critical as we scale our company. This financing is a testament to the great momentum we have established with our innovative hyper-converged infrastructure in the VDI, surveillance and data center sectors,” said Ron Nash, CEO, Pivot3. “We have had significant sales growth and this funding round puts us in a position to pursue more opportunities to accelerate new levels of revenue and earnings.”

Pivot3’s customers continue to show the value of hyper-converged infrastructure solutions in business applications that require high reliability, smooth scalability and fail-safe operations. More than 8,000 Pivot3 hyper-converged appliances are in operation today. The ease of installation and the dependability of operation allow customers to utilize the appliances for a variety of applications.

A new supply chain process installed in May that allows customers to see reduced order-to-delivery times also had a hand in the company’s ability to deliver products efficiently, enhancing customer service and support. In June alone, the company shipped more than $5 million in appliances to customers, validating this new supply chain’s ability to fulfill customer demand for Pivot3’s products quickly and in high volumes.

“It is exciting to see the demand for our hyper-converged infrastructure systems accelerating and with this new supply chain process, we are easily able to handle the increased growth,” said George Scholhamer, VP of customer delivery, Pivot3.

 Pivot3 also announced that Mike Dansby has joined the company as VP and CFO. In his new role, he reports to Nash and is responsible for all financial, legal, human resources and facilities functions. He is an experienced business executive who has led multiple companies as a key financial leader. Prior to joining Pivot3, he served as CFO at Digby, a technology start-up company in Austin, TX that was recently acquired. He has served in senior-level financial roles at technology-focused companies such as MPC Computers, hire.com, Pavilion Technologies, CovaSoft and Question Technologies.

He holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“Mike has deep experience in growing companies and in scaling organizations,” Nash said. “He has also successfully taken smaller companies that were not fully automated and helped develop the management systems necessary to operate and quickly scale their business. He has performed well in fast-growing companies, so we are pleased that he will lead our financial functions as part of our leadership team.”