Nexenta Got $24 Million and New CEO

Nexenta Systems, Inc. closed out 2012 with business growth that exceeded the company plan in terms of revenue, partner growth, partner sales, and customer adoption.

Faced with this growth and opportunity, the company has secured $24 million in series D financing.

Nexenta also announced the appointment of Mark Lockareff as CEO, with former CEO Evan Powell assuming the new role of chief strategy officer.

With 25 years’ experience growing, leading, and investing in disruptive technology companies, Lockareff will drive Nexenta’s next stage of growth as software-defined storage changes the dynamics of the IT technology market.
 
Nexenta’s over-subscribed Series D financing is being led by new investor Four Rivers Group, with participation by existing Nexenta investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures Partners, Sierra Ventures, Razor’s Edge Ventures, LLC and West Summit Capital. In addition to Four Rivers, new strategic investors Presidio Ventures, Inc. and UMC Capital, the corporate venture arm of semiconductor foundry United Microelectronics Corporation participated.

Key highlights include:

• The number of Nexenta-powered storage deployments of one petabyte or greater grew by a factor of 10.
• Revenue growth doubled year-over-year; the company has experienced triple digit growth for three consecutive years.
• Adoption of NexentaStor exceeded the 5,000 customer deployment milestone, while follow-on sales to existing customers expanded by 475%.  
• Total storage under management now exceeds 660PB and Nexenta has enabled an estimated $400 million in hardware storage sales for its reseller partners.
• The company’s global reach continues to expand with active partners growing by 75% since January 2012. Nexenta has established official subsidiaries and teams in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, and Japan.
• Nexenta expanded its product portfolio with the launch of NexentaVSA for View for managing and deploying virtualised environments.

 
 Mark Lockareff has spent the last 25 years growing, leading, and investing in disruptive technology companies during their key growth stages in the enterprise infrastructure, software and internet markets. These companies include: ParAccel, Agiliance, Apptera, Softricity, Model N, Facebook, Riverbed, Quigo, Acopia, ProofPoint, Excite, Classifieds2000 and Echelon.

He was most recently the MD at Bridge Advisory Partners, an advisory firm he founded in 2008 that provided CEO, board of director and executive chairman services to high potential, expansion stage venture and private equity backed technology companies. Prior to Bridge, he was a venture partner at Meritech Capital Partners, a $2.6 billion venture capital firm that funded such companies as BlueArc, Acopia, Fusion-io, Netezza, Greenplum, Cloudera, Riverbed, Facebook, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. Prior to Meritech, he was founder and MD of GameChange Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm affiliated with Accenture that focused on enterprise software investments. Prior to that, he was VP, corporate development at Excite@Home and VP and GM of Classified Advertising for Excite. Earlier in his career, he was VP and GM at Classifieds2000, a product manager at Echelon, an investment banker at Salomon Brothers and started his career in sales at IBM.

Mark holds a BAS in Electrical Engineering and Economics from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
 
 In addition to this appointment, Bridget Warwick is joining as CMO, bringing over 16 years of experience in the storage industry. Most recently, she was CMO of StorSimple which was acquired by Microsoft in October 2012.

Prior to StorSimple, she was VP of NAS marketing and business Development with Hitachi Data Systems after the HDS acquisition of BlueArc in September 2011. She served as BlueArc‘s SVP of marketing and business development from February 2009 until September 2011, and was responsible for product management in addition to marketing and business development. Prior to BlueArc, she spent 10 years at NetApp in several roles including VP of business operations, VP of technical marketing and senior director of engineering. During her time there, she helped the company establish deep product integration with partners, including Microsoft, and was a chief proponent of the company’s growth in the Windows file services and applications market. Prior to her time at NetApp, she held various positions in IT.

She is a graduate of Sheffield University in the UK with a BA (with honors) in French.
 
"Nexenta provides the ideal storage to support Hosting.com’s cloud hosting services and our customers’ mission-critical applications. No other technology can match Nexenta’s price-to-performance, which has helped us offer competitive and differentiated services to companies all over the world. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship between our two companies," said Hosting.com CTO Matt Ferrari.
 
"Our task at Nexenta is simple: we must build a company that is up to meeting the enormous opportunity of leading the transformation of the storage industry. The transition to Software-defined Storage is accelerating because customers must have greater flexibility, performance, and savings in their storage if they are to compete. I’m confident that Mark and Bridget will help us do an even better job for our customers, resellers, and strategic partners," said Powell.