Tintri Closes $18 Million Series C Funding

Tintri, Inc., producer of VM-aware storage appliances, has closed an $18 million Series C funding round led by the company’s current investors, NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The funding will help Tintri accelerate its research and development schedule and invest in regional sales to meet surging customer interest.

"When you have major architecture technology changes, such as those driven by the cloud and virtualization, it introduces new bottlenecks and new problems," said Peter Sonsini, Partner at NEA. "To capitalize on this new architecture, each part of the stack needs to be optimized and rebuilt for this new change. Tintri solves the problems that have arisen in storage. The overwhelming initial customer demand for their VM-aware solution made it clear that we needed to move even faster and invest and leverage this growth."

Storage has emerged as the single great cost in enterprise virtualization budgets, largely due to the fact that today’s leading storage systems were architected before virtualization was even a consideration. Tintri VMstore is a purpose-built storage appliance that is exclusively intended for virtual machines, allowing enterprises to overcome storage-centric bottlenecks and broaden their virtual deployments.

"In just 90 days since launching, Tintri’s ‘VM-aware’ offering has received a disproportionate amount of industry attention," said Christopher Schaepe, Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "We believe they’re poised to emerge as a leader in the emerging storage-for-VMs market, the fastest-growing market segment today. They’ve assembled an extraordinary executive team and are well positioned to lead this industry."

"We’ve seen an incredible amount of both U.S. and international inbound interest since our launch," said Kieran Harty, Tintri CEO. "This funding round will help us expand our sales and R&D efforts to better serve our customers, and we will also be exploring more rapid expansion into new markets beyond our current North American base."

"Tintri has quickly established itself as a disruptive storage player," said Dave Bartoletti, Senior Analyst at Taneja Group. "Virtualization is causing a sea change in the storage industry, one not seen since the rise of network computing over 25 years ago. The Tintri team has unmatched virtualization and storage expertise, so if anyone can deliver a simpler and more cost-effective storage solution – one that’s purpose-built for the unique requirements of virtual workloads- this team can."