5/ $14 Million in Series A Funding for Velostrata …

Velostrata, Inc., provider of on-demand hybrid cloud software, has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners and 83North, formerly Greylock IL Partners.

The company plans to use the funding to further develop the product roadmap and build out its sales, marketing and support teams in North America and Europe.

Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO, and Ady Degany, chief product officer, founded Velostrata in 2014 with the vision of enabling real-time streaming of any workload to and from the cloud without the risk, cost, time or complexity associated with migrating storage.

They founders have careers leading technology innovation in the areas of optimization, intelligent streaming, caching and storage.

CEO Issy Ben-Shaul was CTO and co-founder of Actona, a WAN optimization company acquired by Cisco in 2004. He later co-founded Wanova, a desktop virtualization company, acquired by VMware in 2012.

Chief product officer Ady Degany most recently led product marketing at StorSimple, a storage gateway company acquired by Microsoft in 2012. Prior to StorSimple, he was responsible for product strategy and direction at Wanova.

VP marketing and business development Steve Fulton was VP business development at EMC, VP corporate development at ScaleIO (acquired by EMC), director IP and strategic alliances for cloud computing at Dell, and VP business development at Wanova.

Velostrata is a software solution that enables on-demand hybrid cloud for production workloads. Velostrata’s patent-pending technology decouples compute from storage, enabling enterprises to stream production workloads to and from the cloud in minutes, leave the storage on-premises and optimize performance end-to-end. No changes to the applications, images or storage are required, the same tools and processes can be used to manage existing workloads, and moving workloads to and from the cloud is as simple as clicking a button. Enabling on-demand hybrid cloud for production workloads is low-risk, cost-effective, fast and simple.

“The feedback we’ve received from enterprises in our early adopter program has been tremendous and further establishes that our approach to enabling on-demand hybrid cloud for production workloads is unique in the industry,” said Ben-Shaul. “We are excited to have such great investors in Norwest and Greylock that are committed to the long-term vision and growth of the company.”

“Every CIO is being asked by their management team and board to migrate enterprise infrastructure to the cloud, yet a mere fraction of IT spending goes toward cloud services. Adoption is low because current cloud migration technologies are plagued by challenges like security and compliance risks, cost, migration time, complexity and vendor lock-in,” said Dror Nahumi, general partner, Norwest Venture Partners. “Velostrata provides an innovative hybrid cloud approach that eliminates all these challenges and empowers CIOs to accelerate the migration quest using an evolutionary, secure and highly cost-effective platform.”

“We are just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of how large enterprises will be tapping into the power of the public cloud,” said Yoram Snir, partner with Greylock IL. “Velostrata’s approach of leaving the data on-premises while using the public cloud compute resources de-risks the move to hybrid cloud architecture for enterprise customers while optimizing performance end-to-end. This opens the floodgates for hybrid cloud adoption.”