SoftNAS Secures Private Equity Funding

After a flurry of interest from several high-profile firms, SoftNAS, LLC has received a substantial investment of private equity funds.

For founder and CEO Bill Hood, the only surprise was how quickly investors stood up and took notice of the company’s fundamentals and growth potential. Considering that the company has from day one opened up new territory in the cloud storage sector, the infusion of fresh capital comes at a more opportune time.

Private equity funding will allow SoftNAS to both improve upon its product and expand its market reach.

"SoftNAS is embracing the market for a new storage model – software-defined storage –," explained Hood. "It’s no surprise that customers have begun to follow the trail we blazed with increasing interest and demand. The storage market is moving and changing at a breakneck pace toward software-defined storage, and it’s an exciting world to be a part of right now. Private equity funding allows us to capitalize on what got us here, focusing on making enterprise-grade NAS capabilities available at affordable prices, while continuing to innovate and push the limits of price-performance in storage and management solutions. Private equity gives us the power to make a great product even better, build out our sales and reseller channels and expand our market presence faster."

SoftNAS was launched in February 2013, and in a short time span the product has gained traction across a range of industries worldwide, and caught the attention of tech writers and bloggers. CRN included SoftNAS on their list of top storage technologies for 2013, as an example.

However, the infusion of private equity won’t change the company’s mission of providing adaptable big NAS storage options in a straightforward, economical package. The target market continues to be small and medium-sized organizations and government agencies with a pressing need for flexible storage, bulletproof DR tools.

SoftNAS provides small businesses with the kind of storage and security options once practical only for the largest enterprises. Unlike traditional ‘big NAS’ hardware-based storage appliances, which typically rely upon expensive, proprietary hardware, SoftNAS is software-attached storage. Because the technology works with any standard hardware, users don’t need to overhaul their servers or hire more IT staff. Even users without in-house server hardware can take advantage of the technology on Amazon EC2 and via bare metal cloud providers. SoftNAS is available as SaaS. The software integrates with standard public and private cloud computing platforms, including Amazon EC2, VMware and Hyper-V.