Tintri Raises $125 Million

Tintri Inc., producer of VM-aware storage (VAS) for virtualisation and cloud environments announced the close of a $125 million Series F round led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk.

Tintri’s existing investors – Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Menlo Ventures and New Enterprise Associates – also participated in the round, bringing Tintri’s total capital raised to $260 million.

The company will use the funding to accelerate global adoption of VM-aware storage.

“We are honored to be partnering with such an esteemed group of investors,” said Ken Klein, chairman and CEO, Tintri. “The storage industry is going through a dramatic transformation. Virtualisation and cloud are forces for change-and conventional DAS, NAS and SAN storage is struggling to keep pace. That’s why our message of VM-aware storage (VAS) is winning in the marketplace. This funding fuels our mission-we’ll be growing our global footprint and raising visibility of the business benefits of storage built specifically for virtualised enterprises. Customers that move from traditional and outdated storage platforms to Tintri are consistently amazed by our performance and simplicity-they never look back.”

“We believe Tintri’s trailblasing technology is disrupting storage software architectures for an expanding base of blue-chip customers,” said Adam Grosser, Tintri board member and MD, Silver Lake Kraftwerk. “We see strong long-term growth potential for Tintri, and we are excited to partner with Tintri’s visionary management to deliver the next generation of storage solutions.”

Tintri has driven triple digit year-over-year growth and has an expanding global enterprise customer base – nearly half of its customers report annual revenues of $1 billion or more. At present, it is trusted with more than 400,000 VMs, storing 50PB of user data for enterprises and cloud service providers including Chevron, Comcast, ConocoPhillips, European Investment Bank, GE, NTT, MillerCoors, Rogers Communications, SK Telecom, Sony, Time Warner, United Healthcare and dozens of U.S. Federal Government agencies.

Tintri’s rapid growth demonstrates that as organisations embrace virtualisation, they need storage that does the same.

“We were very excited to migrate our customer workloads from conventional storage to Tintri and see an improvement in performance and available capacity in real time-just plain VM-aware storage out of the box,” said Magnus Osterlund, senior VMware and Wintel architect, Solid Park.

“In the beginning, there was block storage and the leader was EMC and we worked with them. Then came file storage and the leader was NetApp and we worked with them. Now is the era of VM-aware storage and the clear leader is Tintri, and we are excited to make the future with them,” said Shoichi Morita, president and CEO, Networld Inc..

Comments

Last year 56 financial rounds were recorded by storage start-ups in the world. After seven months in 2015, total is only reaching 25 with much smaller amount.

This year the records for a round were $175 million for SimpliVity, then $150 million by Infinidat and $125 million for Tintri here. It was the only three rounds at more than $100 million. There were seven in 2014 with three at more than $200 million.

Tintri is one of the start-ups involved in SSD subsystems getting investment this year. Other ones include Tegile ($70 million) and Kaminario ($15 million).

Now Tintri got a total of $260 million in five rounds:

three rounds in 2011: $17 million (A,B) and then $18 million (C)

$25 million in 2012 (D)

$75 million in 2013 (E)

$125 million in 2015 (F)

In purpose-built SSD storage system for VMs, Tintri was named by StorageNewsletter.com one of the most growing storage companies from 2013 to 2014 achieving triple digit growth, especially doing a good job of stealing NetApp's customers.

Headquartered in Mountain View, CA with a presence in UK, Australia and Japan, the start-up now heads for a planned IPO next year. Already in 2013 CTO and former CEO Harty said the company was on track for early 2015 IPO. The year later, the firm once more said it was planning more than $1 billion IPO in 2015. Now it's 2016 ...

Other storage start-ups that could go public include Nutanix and Pure Storage.

At the end of 2013, Tintri refused a proposal from IBM to be acquired for half billion dollar.