Infinio Secures $12 Million In Financial Funding

Infinio Systems, Inc. has closed a $10 million Series A investment from Highland Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to date to $12 million.

The firms join earlier investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cambridge’s Founder Collective, the NYC Seed Fund, and a group of angel investors. As part of the financing, Highland’s Sean Dalton and Bessemer’s Felda Hardymon have joined the company’s board of directors.

Infinio is developing software solutions to address the most expensive bottleneck in virtual environments: storage performance. The new funding will support additional hiring, product development, and marketing groundwork in preparation for a product launch later this year.

The company was formed in 2011 when Columbia computer science professor Vishal Misra and his fellow researchers saw the potential for their work to solve real-world problems. Misra enlisted co-founders including Endeca veteran Arun Agarwal .

"The majority of performance problems in virtual environments are storage-related," Agarwal, Infinio CEO, said. "Storage systems represent a huge portion of IT budgets, and too often, data center managers find themselves buying more hardware in an effort to improve performance, even when they have plenty of storage space. We’re building a software product that will help solve that problem."

Comments

Here are few information we got about stealth software start-up Infinio in virtual storage performance.

SilverLining Systems changed his name into Infinio Systems this month. It is based in Cambridge, MA, with offices in New York, and currently hiring.

On its web site, you can read: "Do you find yourself buying more storage hardware to improve performance, even when storage capacity isn't exhausted? We're working on a better way - a way you can buy more IOPS without buying more disk."

On Boston.com, CTO Vishal Misra was more precise: "We're targeting data centers and virtualized environments, and trying to solve the performance problems with storage and networking. "

"When a company has hundreds or thousands of virtual machines running on servers in a data center," he explains. "If you think about it, every machine is running similar software, and that means the bits are almost identical on all those virtual machines. But the way storage and networking works is that those servers go and fetch the same bits again and again from the storage system. Our thinking is, if the same bits are traveling over a network to multiple CPUs, why not store them or cache them locally?"

He also added the idea springs from a new kind of networking architecture called "content-centric networking."

Storage for VMs is a great market since at least two years with now a lot of competitors being big storage companies or start-ups. We will have to wait to know what really will offer Infinio to differentiate.

Infinio is already an Elite-level member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program.

Its team comes from companies including EMC, Endeca, IBM, NetApp, Microsoft, Netezza, Permabit, and Veeam.

Main executives:

Arun Agarwal, co-founder and CEO: His previous experience includes product management and marketing at Endeca Technologies (acquired by Oracle in 2011), in unstructured data management, web commerce and business intelligence solutions, as well as work with several Boston-area venture capital firms.

Vishal Misra, co-founder, president and CTO: The core idea that launched his company grew out of his research while working with Dan Rubenstein at Columbia University. In addition to his academic credentials as a tenured professor, he has been a scientific advisor to tech and media companies, and was a founder and technical lead for large sports web site Cricinfo.com (acquired by ESPN).

Fritz Knabe, VP, engineering: He came from Netezza (acquired by IBM in 2010), where he opened and ran the company's Kendall Square R&D office. He was a member of the founding team at Endeca and other startup tech companies.

Carrie Reber, VP marketing: She was the third US employee at Veeam Software and has contributed to the acquisition of nine early-stage companies.

Michael A. Bova, principal software QA lead: He was lead QA engineer involved with testing the EMC Atmos cloud.