Nutanix Raises $33 Million in Oversubscribed Series C

Nutanix Inc. has raised $33M Series C funding from current investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, and new investors Battery Ventures and Goldman Sachs.

This new round – which brings Nutanix’s total financing to over $71M since inception – provides a large war chest to the company to expand sales, marketing, and support, and double up in R&D.

Achievements in 2.5 years since conception:

• $71.5M in funding, 75% of which makes up for a future war chest.
• 100+ employees.
• Fastest growing infrastructure start-up in the last decade with record growth and revenue in fiscal year ending July 2012.
• 150 systems shipped, including 600 servers attached with more than 3.3 PB of spindle and Fusion-io storage.
• Fastest R&D to 50-node clusters.
• Fastest to 100 paid units.
• Fastest to 50 reseller partners.
• Fastest to distribution in Europe and Japan.
• All in 2 years since Series A in July 2010.

Conceived in December 2009, Nutanix raised Series A ($13.3M) in July 2010, Series B ($25.3M) in August 2011 – right before launching the product at VMworld 2011 – and now Series C ($33M) in August 2012.

The company has more than 70 customers – including large customers in US federal, technology, advertising, healthcare, and higher education – many of whom are repeat buyers, underscoring the beauty of a scale-out platform that grows over time.

"We are in a perfect storm of paradigm shifts in the datacenter – cloud computing, software-defined storage, and server-side flash. That, coupled with our execution, has given us an enviable stature within the marketplace," says Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO of Nutanix. "Collapsing compute and storage was a radical idea when we took it to Bipul in late ’09. The market has spoken, and spoken resoundingly," he added, alluding to the revenue traction and the opportunity ahead.

"We’ve changed the game with what people now call software-defined storage. Bringing the Google virtues of embarrassingly-parallel computing to the masses is a very hard problem," affirms Mohit Aron, co-founder and CTO of Nutanix. "The attention to detail vis-à-vis ease-of-use and deployment, hi-density performance, and seamless scalability are the little things that are making us viral," he adds, referring to the quiet confidence within the company in its ability to deliver Apple-like products to the datacenter.

Trailblazing software-defined storage wrapped in x86 sheet metal. Nutanix Complete Cluster has eschewed any custom hardware facilities to implement storage services like HA, data protection, or performance. The product has also avoided any ‘hard wiring’ of configuration in the factory, assumptions that would make multi-tenancy and mixed workloads almost impossible to implement in today’s cloud computing environments. The product makes no assumptions in features like DR or peak-triggered cloud bursting that the remote endpoint would be Nutanix’s factory sheet metal.

Yet the company believes in controlling the end-user experience of performance and reliability. Nutanix’s off-the-shelf commodity hardware approach reduces sales friction, guarantees predictable end-user experience, and keeps promises of enterprise support meaningful.