Diablo Technologies Closes $28 Million Funding Round

Diablo Technologies, Inc., in memory system interface products, announced the closing of a $28 million funding round, adding several new US and European investors and board members.

The investment will be used to complete its Memory Channel Storage (MCS) technology platform. The soon-to-be-announced MCS system of products enable substantial improvements in transaction processing and data analysis within compute-servers, enterprise datacenters and cloud-computing facilities worldwide.

The funding round was led by Battery Ventures and included additional financing from Celtic House Venture Partners, BDC Venture Capital, and Hasso Plattner Ventures.

Riccardo Badalone, founder and CEO, commented: "Over the past two years Diablo Technologies has developed an innovative memory channel-based solid-state storage platform. With this equity funding we are accelerating the completion of a system solution including hardware, software and a chip-set that will deliver breakthroughs in system performance and flash storage density for analytic data processing, web-page serving, cloud computing and other server-based enterprise computing applications. We are pleased to welcome Scott Tobin and Alex Benik both of Battery Ventures, and Yaron Valler from Hasso-Plattner Ventures to our board of directors."

"Storage is undergoing the type of a technological revolution that we see only once every few decades, and it’s an exciting time to be involved with the entrepreneurs and technologists who are leading this new wave," said Scott Tobin, Battery General Partner. "Today’s emerging companies are attacking tough strategic problems, and creating tremendous value across the enterprise-storage stack. We believe Diablo Technologies has the technology and creativity to usher in the next phase of innovation in NAND-flash storage. This investment is the perfect complement to our recent success in the flash storage space, with Anobit (flash memory controllers) being acquired by Apple, and XtremIO (scale-out flash arrays) being acquired by EMC."

"Existing investors BDC and Celtic House are tremendously excited to see the evolution of Diablo being positioned to redefine in-memory computing," said Tom Valis of Celtic House Venture Partners.

Comments

Founded in April 2002, Diablo Technologies is a fabless semiconductor company in mixed signal expertise and specializing in high speed serial interconnect to design ASIC.

The Ottawa, ONT, Canada-based firm raised at least $48 million since its inception in three rounds of equity financing: $5 million venture loan from MMV Financial in 2007; $15 million in series B funding from BDC Venture Capital, GTI Capital and Celtic House Venture Partners in 2008; and $28 million here, notably involving Battery Ventures that was an investor in Akamai Technologies (IPO), Anobit (acquired by Apple), Kashya (acquired by EMC), Netezza (acquired by IBM), and XtremIO (acquired by EMC) with current portfolio including Nutanix and Zerto.

This recent biggest round can be explained by the current development of its Memory Channel Storage (MCS) platform coming in 2013 and based on a mix of DRAM, flash chips and software to get speedy transfer rate and low latency, apparently faster than today's successful PCIe flash cards*. The company stated: "With MCS, it will not be necessary to overspend on flash capacity to obtain the highest levels of SSD performance, nor will it be necessary to opt for larger and more expensive equipment that can accommodate the wasteful overprovisioning of real-estate, power, and CPU cores."

The 40-employee company was up to now in HyperCloud memory modules that have been qualified on Sandybridge EP systems at IBM, HP, and other server OEMs.

* Firms already launching PCIe SSDs include Active Media, DDRdrive (also combining DRAM and NAND), Dolphin, Extreme Engineering Solutions, Foremay, Fusion-io, ICS, Innodisk, Intel, LSI, Micron, Mushkin, Netlist, OCZ, PhotoFast, Renice, Samsung, SanDisk, Stec, Super Talent, Virident and X-ES.

Executives of Diablo Technologies:

Co-founder and CEO Riccardo Badalone was senior designer at Nortel Networks and manager of the OEM hardware design group at Matrox Graphics, where he and his team designed generations of desktop motherboard platforms for all PC OEMs including HP, Dell, Compaq, Siemens, and Fujitsu.

Co-founder and VP operations Michael Parziale also came from Nortel where he led a specialized verification team that was responsible for multi-chip verification for proprietary SONET-based and Ethernet protocols.

Co-founder and VP, strategic customer engineering, Franco Forlini was a founding member of BroadTel Communications, a start-up acquired by Unique Broadband Systems.

CTO Maher Amer was the Digital Prime at IceFyre semiconductor, responsible for the development of a 802.11a wireless chipset and also part of Extreme Packet Devices, a start-up that was acquired by PMC-Sierra. He started his career as an analogue designer at Mosaid Technologies designing DRAM and SRAM memory arrays.

VP engineering John Vincent was at the center of ASIC and system development since his contributions at Nortel in the mid 90's. Most recently, he was the director of R&D at Huawei’s Ottawa Design center, responsible for the Network Processor ASIC design activities.

VP sales Tom Woodard recently came from SSD provider Anobit. He was also sales director for PMC-Sierra and VP sales at Dot Hill Systems and Adaptec.