SwiftStack Closes $6.1 Million in Series A

SwiftStack, Inc. has raised $6.1 million in a Series A round of funding.

The round, led by Mayfield Fund with additional participation from Storm Ventures and UMC Capital, brings the company’s total financing to date to $7.6 million (including $1.5 million in seed funding).

The company will use the investment to support growth of the sales team, expand operations and advance development of its software-defined storage (SDS) solution.

"SwiftStack is a great addition to our portfolio, which has included highly successful storage companies such as 3PAR and StorSimple. The company is uniquely positioned to be a front runner in the emerging software-defined storage market," said Navin Chaddha, MD, Mayfield Fund. "With SwiftStack, application developers and operations teams can leverage the power of the public cloud storage inside their own datacenter, kind of like Amazon S3-in-a-box."

"SwiftStack has been tested with impressive results in large-scale deployments with early customers," said Ryan Floyd, founder and general partner, Storm Ventures. "For these customers, the SwiftStack solution has transformed how storage is provisioned, managed and accessed on industry-standard hardware. We look forward to the company’s continued growth and are excited to see the change they will bring to the enterprise storage market."

SwiftStack is building a software-defined storage solution for object storage. The platform decouples the management from the underlying storage infrastructure, enabling customers to build pools of storage on commodity hardware. As a result, they are able to achieve greater scale, flexibility and durability. SwiftStack’s storage system helps organizations with considerable amounts of data simplify operations to reduce overall operational costs.

"Hardware is rapidly accelerating to become commoditized, and SwiftStack uncovers the potential of this raw capacity through its innovative storage system," said Frank Lee, VP, UMC Capital. "The company is poised to leverage the changing landscape, where customers are looking to make use of standards-based hardware for their storage needs."

"These reputable firms bring a wealth of storage experience to our team, and their investment allows us to fully concentrate on company growth and technology development," said Joe Arnold, CEO, SwiftStack. "Current storage methods are too general and do not effectively provide our customers with the flexibility, scale and cost efficiency required to support their ever-growing data sets and workloads. Our software-defined storage platform addresses this by fundamentally changing how storage is provisioned, managed and scaled in datacenters."