PernixData Closes $20 Million in Series B Round

PernixData, Inc., building a scale-out, software-defined storage platform by virtualizing server-side flash, announced the close of an over-subscribed $20 million Series B financing.

The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) with additional support from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Mark Leslie, John Thompson and Lane Bess.

PernixData also announced that Matt Murphy , general partner at KPCB, will join its board of directors.

PernixData’s Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) enables virtualized datacenters to take advantage of an architecture that decouples storage performance from storage capacity. Companies no longer need to purchase capacity from storage vendors when they need storage performance. This design promises to solve the storage performance problem forever, and also ensures that enterprises can scale out their performance as easily as they scale their compute and memory, without any need to change applications or storage infrastructure.

With this additional investment, PernixData will grow its sales and marketing globally, continue its R&D roadmap, develop a channel eco-system and accelerate go-to-market plans with players in the server and storage industries.

"We plan to use the latest round of financing to expand our footprint in the enterprise and give our customers a beautiful alternative to scale their storage performance independent of capacity," said Poojan Kumar, CEO and co-founder of PernixData.

"PernixData is solving one of the biggest outstanding issues in enterprise data centers: the cost and performance of storage," said Matt Murphy of KPCB. "Pernix has the opportunity to do for storage what VMware did for compute. The technical team they’ve assembled for such an ambitious mission is unparalleled."

"Customers and partners have been waiting for a long time for a solution such as FVP, which positions PernixData to capitalize on a huge market opportunity in storage," said Bipul Sinha, Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners.

"Virtualization deserves better from storage, and this is just the beginning of the disruption we have planned for the storage industry. Watch out for even more innovations in the future as we execute at an unprecedented pace," said Satyam Vaghani, CTO and co-founder of PernixData.

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