Violin Memory Got As Much As $35 Million in Series B

Violin Memory, Inc. announced a $35 Million Series B funding round which includes Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, the inventor and a technology leader of NAND flash and Violin’s strategic investor since April 2010. Also joining this round is networking firm Juniper Networks, along with other corporate partners, crossover investment funds, high net worth industry leaders and private equity general partners.

Violin Memory is now in the growth stage of this multi-billion dollar market opportunity and the added investment from several of the largest public companies in the computer industry (both announced and unannounced) puts Violin in a strong position to deliver flash Memory Arrays to the world’s leading enterprise datacenters.

"Toshiba is the most experienced NAND flash supplier with a proven legacy of innovation," said Scott Nelson, Vice President, Memory Business Unit at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. "We are pleased to expand our relationship with Violin and help accelerate the penetration of flash Memory Arrays in the performance-driven enterprise data centers."

"Violin Memory is a true performance leader in high-end silicon storage," said R.K. Anand, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Business at Juniper Networks. "We believe their innovative flash Memory Array will play an important role in delivering tiered and near-server storage capabilities to help advance the requirements of cloud computing and network-driven data center consolidation."

"We are honored by the continued support from Toshiba, the recognized leader in the Flash industry, and welcome Juniper Networks, a force in large scale data center and Cloud network infrastructure, to our investor base," said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. “We are aggressively expanding our partnership and distribution capabilities in 2011 and look forward to another record setting year of growth in this large global market."

Violin’s Memory Arrays are transforming the data center for companies like AOL, Microsoft and HP through its patent-pending flash vRAID technology. The company was recently named one of StorageNewsletter’s ’15 Most Promising Startups,’ a ‘Top 10 Data Storage Startup’ by Enterprise Storage Forum and is a finalist for SearchStorage.com’s Product of the Year.

Comments

$35 million is the hugest amount received in one round by a storage start-up this year. In 2010, only Violin's competitor Fusion-io got more, $45 million, proving the interest of the VC community for enterprise SSDs.

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Mountain View, CA with around 100 employees, Violin got another $20 million last year and now total is approximately at $110 million. Among the former investors, there was also Samsung.