Panzura Raises $25 million

Panzura, Inc. has closed a $25 million Series D funding round led by late-stage funding experts Meritech Capital Partners with participation from its existing investors Matrix Partners, Khosla Ventures, Opus Capital and Chevron Technology Ventures, the investment arm of the world’s third-largest oil conglomerate.

Meritech Capital Partners MD Paul Madera joins Panzura’s board of directors.

The new round of funding brings the company’s total backing to $58 million, and is expected to fund the company through profitability.

Panzura grew its customer base by 700% in 2012 and has already exceeded 2012 bookings thus far in 2013. The new capital will be applied toward continuing this growth and increased momentum. The company will expand its international sales presence into the AsiaPac region, while continuing to scale its US-based and EMEA-based marketing, sales and engineering operations. The EMEA expansion partially funded by the company’s Series C round was successful, leading to major wins in the UK, Switzerland and the Nordics. The company also plans to continue expanding its channel ecosystem and exploring joint development projects with strategic partners, while continuing a concerted emphasis on internal research and product development.

Meritech Capital Partners focuses exclusively on late-stage investing. Madera was a founder of Meritech Capital Partners in 1999. Recognized multiple times on the Forbes Midas list, he is known for his investments in enterprise cloud and infrastructure companies; he has led Meritech’s investments into BlueArc (Hitachi Data), Facebook, Force10 (Dell), Riverbed Technology, and Salesforce.com among others.

"The explosion in unstructured data and the desire to make files available to a global, distributed workforce are rendering traditional enterprise file storage infrastructure obsolete," said Madera. "Panzura’s solution delivers cloud storage to the enterprise in a scalable, high-performance solution that slashes capital expenditures while enabling seamless global file sharing."

Panzura offers a cloud-integrated storage system capable of delivering an enterprise solution, with NAS functionality, native cloud support, a globally distributed file system, built-in FIPS 140-2 certified security and data protection, as well as high data transfer rates to and from the cloud, all in a single, storage solution with scalability. Panzura has the largest number of petabytes under management and boasts the largest companies in several verticals (including finance, media, entertainment, and government) among its customers.

Gartner recently recognized Panzura as a Cool Vendor in storage technology for 2013. According to the citation, "Panzura should appeal to midsize to large organizations that want to implement private or hybrid cloud storage to consolidate multisite file storage, offer more effective project and data sharing, and provide backup and archiving to the inexpensive public cloud."

"Panzura is delighted to be adding the expertise of our new partners at Meritech, and particularly late-stage funding guru Paul Madera to our board, and we are encouraged by the ongoing support of our existing longtime partners," said Randy Chou, CEO and co-founder of Panzura. "Panzura provides the only viable cloud-based solution for the enterprise, directly enabling high-value business objectives – such as improved cost, scale, management, availability and global access – while fitting seamlessly into existing IT infrastructures. With the support of this Series D round, Panzura looks forward to profitability and the further innovation and development of global cloud-integrated storage solutions."