Stealthy Start-Up Nutanix Raises $13.2 million

Nutanix, Inc., developer of a converged compute and storage appliance for virtualized data centers, has received $13.2 million in Series A funding in an oversubscribed round.  

Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, which manages over $2 billion of committed capital and has made investments in companies such as Brocade, Riverbed, and Fusion-io, and Blumberg Capital, an early-stage venture firm.  

The funding will be used to help Nutanix establish a strong market presence in North America.

Nutanix is bringing ‘Google-like’ scale-out and converged infrastructure to virtualized data centers. Designed from the ground up for server and desktop virtualization, Nutanix Complete Appliance shrinks the datacenter through its converged architecture, reducing capital costs, power consumption and administration costs. The market is moving towards converged appliances for data centers, with companies such as EMC Corporation, Cisco Systems, NetApp, VMware and HP introducing server and storage bundles (Vblock, FlexPod, BladeSystem Matrix and others). In contrast, Nutanix Complete Appliance brings data closer to virtual machines, delivering convergence through a combination of scalable software and industry-standard hardware components. Purpose-built for virtualization, the Nutanix converged architecture provides cost, performance and manageability benefits that are not possible by simply bundling servers and storage.

Nutanix founders have careers leading technology innovation at Google, Oracle and Aster Data Systems, a scale-out data warehousing company recently acquired by Teradata:

• Co-founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey was formerly vice president of engineering at Aster Data and played a leadership role in the development of Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata.
• Co-founder Dr. Mohit Aron, CTO, was architect at Aster Data and earlier led the design and development of Google File System (GFS), the software that manages data on Google’s converged compute and storage clusters. 
• Co-founder and chief products officer Ajeet Singh was previously senior director of product management at Aster Data and played a key role in defining Oracle’s early strategy for cloud computing. 

In addition to Pandey, Aron and Singh, the Nutanix board of directors includes Ravi Mhatre and Bipul Sinha from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Nutanix Moves Beyond Legacy Architectures
"The architecture that fully separates the compute tier from storage was designed twenty years ago. Since then, virtualization and solid-state drives have disrupted the technology stack, creating the need to fundamentally rethink the architecture. Scale-out clusters, virtualization, and solid-state drives are the building blocks that will form the foundation of next-generation cloud environments," said the Nutanix founders. "We realized that a truly converged architecture would drastically shrink and simplify the data centers for cloud computing and provide disruptive cost, performance and manageability benefits."

Nutanix is guided by an advisory panel including industry veterans, IT leaders and computer-science researchers.:

• Mark Leslie was the founding chairman and CEO of VERITAS Software and has served on the boards of VMware and NetApp.   
• Frank Artale, a partner at venture capital firm Ignition Partners, was most recently group vice president, business development, at Citrix Systems.
• Beth White was vice president of marketing and a member of the executive team that led Data Domain through its IPO and acquisition by EMC for $2.1 billion.
• David Schneider was most recently the executive vice president, Global Sales, EMC.
• Alan Boehme is senior vice president, IT strategy and enterprise architecture, at ING.  
• Dr. Willy Zwaenepoel, a professor and dean at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, is a leading expert in operating systems and distributed systems.

"Nutanix has a strong management and technical team with a successful record of building scale-out systems that are used by enterprises and companies such as Google," said Mhatre of Lightspeed Venture Partners. "We’re extremely impressed with the company’s breakthrough solution for a market with huge potential."

"Nutanix has developed a technology that does away with the cost and complexity of network storage by uniquely combining compute and storage. We are excited to help build this disruptive company," said David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital.

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