Cloudian Raises $94 Million in Funding, Total at $173 Million

Cloudian, Inc. raised $94 million in a series E funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $173 million.

The round includes participation from investors Digital Alpha Advisors, LLC., Eight Roads Ventures, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), JPIC (Japan Post Investment Corporation), NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. and WS (Wilson Sonsini) Investments.

The firm will use this investment, which is the largest single round to date for a distributed file systems and object storage provider, to expand its worldwide sales and marketing efforts and increase its engineering team to meet rising demand for its limitlessly-scalable enterprise storage solutions.

“Cloudian redefines enterprise storage with a global data fabric that integrates both private and public clouds – spanning across sites and around the globe – at an unprecedented scale that creates new opportunities for businesses to derive value from data,” Cloudian CEO Michael Tso. “Cloudian’s unique architecture offers the limitless scalability, simplicity, and cloud integration needed to enable the next generation of computing driven by advances such as IoT and machine learning technologies.”

According to IDC, the worldwide enterprise storage market grew by 34.4% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2018, reaching over $52 billion in annualized revenue.

Cloudian’s global enterprise storage fabric meets this growing demand with a software-defined-storage platform that transforms standard servers and VMs into a pool of logical storage resources that can be co-located with data sources and data consumers, whether in physical data centers, at remote sites, or in the cloud. Scalable to hundreds of petabytes and beyond, its architecture creates a global federation of storage assets to form a hyperscale fabric that eliminates the boundaries of traditional storage, allowing information resources to be transparently pooled and shared over distance.

“Computing now operates without physical boundaries, and customers need storage solutions that also span from the data center to the edge,” said Takayuki Inagawa, president and CEO, NTT DOCOMO Ventures. “Cloudian’s geo-distributed architecture creates a global fabric of storage assets that supports the next generation of connected devices.”

Global businesses in data-intensive verticals such as media, healthcare and manufacturing create and consume vast quantities of data at hundreds of locations across the organization. Cloudian meets these distributed storage needs with a peer-to-peer resource fabric and a single management framework that spans company’s storage appliances, industry standard X86 servers running firm’s software, and public cloud storage. The result is simple, efficient data management across the global storage landscape.

“For too long, enterprise storage users have settled for solutions that offer incrementally more performance or scale without fundamentally addressing the challenge of global data management,” said Daniel Auerbach, senior managing partner, Eight Roads Ventures. “When Eight Roads Ventures first invested in Cloudian in 2014 we saw a different approach – here was a company applying cloud-scale technologies to the enterprise storage challenge. This, our third round of investment, affirms our belief in Cloudian’s innovative approach and next stage of growth.”

Recently added Cloudian customers include public health agencies in the US and UK, two of the top five Formula One teams, a US national research lab, an online travel market leader, a top three pharmaceutical company, a top three global car maker, a top five European bank, an Ivy League university, and one of the world’s largest global engineering companies.

“Global 2000 customers in media, automotive, manufacturing, healthcare, and government look to Cloudian to manage their rapidly growing information assets, a trend that we see only accelerating,” said Edouard Hervey, MD, Goldman Sachs. “We believe Cloudian is well-positioned to dominate the next generation of enterprise storage with its elegantly simple design that integrates both the data center and cloud environments.”

“With long-standing roots in the Silicon Valley, our firm has represented over 3,000 private companies and early-stage start-ups, giving us a unique perspective on the success factors found in high-growth firms,” said Larry Sonsini, Cloudian investor and senior and founding partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. “WS Investments chose to work with the Cloudian management team led by Michael Tso because they exhibit the markers of long-term success with a strong, integrity-driven culture and an innovative solution to the vital challenge of global data management.“

Unlike traditional storage solutions whose architectures were derived from stand-alone systems that operate within a single data center, Cloudian’s architecture was built on cloud technologies that were designed for distributed environments and limitless scale.

“There will be 20 billion connected devices by 2020, creating a compelling need for data management solutions that are architected for geo-distribution and cloud integration,” said Gregory M. Bryant, Intel Corp.‘s SVP and GM of the client computing group and Cloudian board member. “Cloudian’s global data fabric architecture lets customers manage data organization-wide from a single console, so they can capitalize on the next generation of connected computing.”

The Series E funding includes a $25 million investment from Digital Alpha that was first announced in February.

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