Cloudian Secures Funding Commitment of $125 Million

Cloudian, Inc. announced a $125 million joint venture with Digital Alpha Advisors, LLC. to accelerate adoption of Cloudian’s enterprise object storage systems.

The joint venture includes a utility financing facility of up to $100 million from Digital Alpha and its Limited Partners to enable flexible procurement options to accommodate customers’ rapidly growing storage environments.

It also includes a $25 million equity commitment to support expansion of Cloudian’s sales, marketing, engineering, and customer-support organisations.

The $100 million financing facility will enable consumption-model procurement of Cloudian products.

Today, IT groups are under pressure to deliver services on demand, free of up-front capital outlays. While the public cloud is right for some of these workloads, others are best kept on premises. Through this partnership, customers can take advantage of an on-premises solution that provides the data sovereignty, performance and control of enterprise storage together with the economics of a pay-per-use model.

Digital Alpha will also support the development of a partnership between Cloudian and Cisco Systems, Inc., covering relevant data-centre architectures. Cloudian’s data-management features, integrated cloud-storage management and broad interoperability make it a differentiated solution.

In 2017, the company doubled its installed base to more than 200 customers.

Managing partner Rick Shrotri stated: “Digital Alpha spent months evaluating customer satisfaction with object-storage installations and found the ease of use, deployment and scalability of Cloudian to be highly differentiated. Moreover, we believe the firm is well positioned to leverage its leadership in Amazon S3 API integration in the emerging use-cases of IoT, analytic and multi-cloud environments. Finally, we believe the culture created by the experienced management team at Cloudian will be conducive to further growth, as it is an attractive destination for industry-leading talent.”

This joint venture will capitalise on the growth of object storage in 2018, which is driven by the convergence of data growth, the emergence of the Amazon S3 API as an industry standard and accelerating AI/machine learning and IoT use cases.

“For our customers, this joint venture will enable flexible procurement models and new hardware options to accelerate their transition to next-generation object storage solutions,” said Cloudian CEO Michael Tso. “With emerging capacity-intensive use cases such as IoT and machine learning, today’s data management needs are rapidly outgrowing traditional platforms. Cloudian’s solutions offer the limitless scalability, superior ease of use and cloud integration our customers need to solve their largest-capacity storage challenges while saving time and cost.”

Digital Alpha Advisors is an investment firm focused on digital infrastructure and services required by the digital economy, with a strategic collaboration agreement with Cisco. As part of this agreement, the firm has preferred access to Cisco’s pipeline of commercial opportunities requiring equity financing. It believes that it is the first fund focused on making private equity investments in the growth opportunities required to underpin the digital economy, including smart cities, next generation broadband networks, and enterprise data management and communication solutions.