Kaminario Raises $75 Million in Funding
Bringing total to $218 million
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on January 13, 2017 at 3:24 pmKaminario, Inc. has secured $75 million in a new round of financing, bringing the company’s total funding to $218 million.
The latest round was led by Waterwood, a private equity firm that invests in growth-stage technology companies. Participation in this round was a mix of new and existing investors, including Sequoia, Pitango, Lazarus, Silicon Valley Bank and Globespan Capital Partners.
The new capital will be used to accelerate go-to-market initiatives, expand Kaminario’s global presence, and fuel R&D.
“Our strong business growth, cutting-edge technology and the all-flash market opportunity make Kaminario very attractive to investors and partners alike,” said Dani Golan, founder and CEO, Kaminario. “The role of the data center is transforming as businesses continue to accelerate digital transformation and cloud adoption, and we are perfectly positioned to deliver agile storage solutions for today’s on-demand applications. This new funding will allow us to continue our global expansion and accelerate our innovation agenda to better serve our customers.“
IDC estimates the all-flash array market will grow at a five-year CAGR of 21.4% through 2020 – representing the fastest growing segment of a $40 billion worldwide enterprise storage systems market.
IoT, cloud adoption and on-demand applications are key growth drivers for storage. For example, reports state there will be more than 200 billion connected devices and smart technologies and more than 44 trillion gigabytes of data will be generated by 2020. Cloud computing and software-as-a-service are revolutionizing how businesses operate and instantaneous access to information in a mobile-first world is a must.
What’s Next for Kaminario?
With this new funding, Kaminario is well positioned to move into 2017 and beyond.
Global Expansion: Accelerate expansion across Eastern and Western Europe, AsiaPac and the Middle East leveraging its Accelarate Channel Partner program.
Eco-system Partnerships: Expand technology eco-system partnerships to deliver more complete solutions to customers with emphasis on bringing storage closer to the application layer with tighter integration with database platforms, virtualization solutions, hypervisors and development paradigms.
Technology Innovation: Leverage Kaminario’s software defined architecture so customers can adopt new hardware technologies quickly, with no forklift upgrades. With emerging hardware technologies such as NVMe and NVMe Fabric (NVMeF) on the horizon, this latest round will allow Kaminario to accelerate its innovation agenda and give existing customers a faster path to leverage new technology advancements – seamlessly, without impacting performance or disrupting their existing infrastructure.
“With more and more companies shifting a lot of their application purchases from on-premise to cloud SaaS models, SaaS providers are seeing insane scale demands that completely destroy the traditional infrastructure paradigm,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Slow I/O can mean the death of your business – as can the cost of over provisioning. Kaminario is in a perfect position to handle outrageous I/O demands without forcing providers to buy more than they need in advance.”
“There is a major shift in the storage industry as enterprises move from traditional disk storage to storage driven by NAND flash technologies“, said David Floyer, CTO and co-founder, Wikibon. “We expect 19% of enterprise storage spend to be on all-flash in 2016, and project that in 2019 the flash spend will exceed disk spend. Kaminario is well positioned to address the enterprise requirements for both performance and capacity flash storage.“
Comments
After only ten days in 2017, there are already three significant financial rounds by storage start-ups compared to a total of 36 for the entire 2016 year:
- ♦ Bitglass: $45 million, total at $80 million
- ♦ Panzura: $32 million, total at $90 million
- ♦ Kaminario: $75 million total at $218 million
Only eleven firms got more than $218 million in total funding in the history of the storage industry. Among them, in all-flash arrays (AFAs) only, Pure Storage got $470 million before an IPO and Tintri $260 million.
Born in 2008, Kaminario, with less than 300 people, got this important amount among several rounds including:
- ♦ $15 million in 2011
- ♦ $25 million in 2012
- ♦ $53 million in 2014
- ♦ $15 million in 2015
- ♦ $75 million in 2017 (nearly double the expected amount)
Total is here $183 million and not $218 million as announced in the press release because we don't know how much the firm got for series A and B rounds probably totaling $35 million before 2011.
VCs participating in these investments include Globespan Capital Partners, Lazarus Hedge Fund, Mitsui & Co., Global Investment, Pitango Venture Capital, Sequoia Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Tenaya Capital, and Waterwood Investment Management Limited.
In a recent interview Kaminario's CEO Dani Golan said to be headed towards $100 million in revenue for the company and will go for IPO for an undetermined year.
Per comparison, Pure Storage, never profitable, registered sales $74.1 million the quarter preceding its $425 million in IPO in 2015 with an incredible growth of around 50% per trimester. Kaminario said revenue increased by 2.7x last year.
Among the 88 companies in AFAs in the world, Kaminario is probably not profitable.
We think it could be the last financial round for the firm.
The company has no known OEMs and getting at least a big one could accelerate the transition to the stock exchange. But all the storage giants have already their own AFAs.
Kaminario's roadmap include improvement in scalability, cost efficiency, performance network and NVMe Fabric.
IDC gives some advices to Kaminario in a recent Vendor Profile
Kaminario: Innovating Beyond Scale-Up and Scale-Out Flash Architectures to Make AFAs the Heart of a Modern Datacenter, written by analysts Archana Venkatraman and Carla Arend
In order to maintain its growth and market position in the fast-moving all-flash space, Kaminario should:
- ♦ Amplify its strengths: Kaminario should demonstrate through PoCs and use cases how scale-out and scale-up foundation is right at the heart of its solutions and how it is core to its engineering innovation. This will help it to continue differentiating its offerings from other scale-out AFA products. It should also emphasize how its latest K-Assured guarantee programs can help customers rely on it without worries as they follow on their digital transformation journeys.
- ♦ Accelerate QoS additions: The use of AFA solutions in primary storage for consolidating mixed workloads is becoming a common practice. The vendor should focus on adding QoS capabilities quickly to ensure it meets all the features on enterprise and SaaS providers' wish lists.
- ♦ Continue addressing core AFA adoption hurdles: Kaminario is one of the few AFA vendors that has addressed the high cost of flash hurdle by adopting technologies such as TLC early on. It is also addressing other concerns such as data migration issues, replication, availability, and forklift upgrades. It should continue to focus its engineering efforts and investments to address users' AFA-related concerns to further gain confidence from enterprise customers.
- ♦ Expand in the European market: Building a strong position in the second largest market for AFA products requires continuous investment in marketing, building brand awareness and expanding a strong reseller network across the various European geographies.
Read also:
Exclusive Interview With Dani Golan, Founder and CEO, Kaminario
"There is no point today to go hybrid."
by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2016.11.15 | News
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