Stealthy Elastifile Raises $8 Million in Series A

Elastifile Ltd., a company developing new storage technology that improves the performance and reduces the cost of large data centers and private clouds, has raised $8 million in Series A financing from Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

As part of the investment, Battery General partner Itzik Parnafes and Lightspeed partner David Gussarsky will join Elastifile’s board.

Elastifile’s co-founders are serial entrepreneurs and experienced executives.

They include:

•   CEO Amir Aharoni, previously an executive at Mobixell Networks and Optibase;
• CTO Shahar Frank, co-founder of XtremIO, a flash array storage company which was acquired by EMC in May 2012; and
• VP of R&D Roni Luxenburg, formerly director of software engineering at Red Hat.

Founded in 2013, Elastifile is redefining storage for the next generation of software-defined data centers and private clouds, which require elastic, high-performance, cost-effective and converged compute and storage services. The company’s solution leverages emerging and pervasive data-center technologies such as flash-based storage media and 10GE networks.

“Elastifile’s unique, built-from-the-ground-up, flash-dedicated architecture will deliver an elastic scale-out solution, which the new breed of fast-growing data centers and private clouds need — at an unmatched price-performance ratio,” said CEO Aharoni. “And we could not ask for better partners in this venture than Battery and Lightspeed, two firms with extensive experience and track records of success in the fast-growing, enterprise-storage market.“

Both firms previously invested together in XtremIO.

“Elastifile is solving a big problem,” added Battery’s Parnafes. “The flexibility, manageability and performance of Elastifile’s solution will change the way storage architects manage primary storage in their data centers.” “I am excited to back such a seasoned team with a singular focus and ambitious vision,” said Gussarsky, of Lightspeed. “The potential market for this technology is enormous, and we look forward to partnering with Amir, Shahar and Roni to build innovative new products.”

Elastifile develops a new elastic, scale-out, and converged storage solution for next-generation data centers. The company, based in Herzliya, Israel is building a high-performance scale-out solution for virtualized data-centers and private clouds.