New Direction for Excelero?

We don’t know how life is going there but it seems that the exec layer is shaken a bit.

We already touched a bit these potential troubles during a recent article about Paladian Data.

Founded in 2014, the company has raised a limited amount, just $35 million, being probably very frugal in a period where sales cycles got increased, in-person sales difficult so impacting immediately the top line.

Also did Josh Goldenhar, former VP products at Excelero, anticipate this as he joined Lightbits Labs early this year for the same position. 

Lior Gal, former CEO, mentioned on his LinkedIn page that his role ends in September 2020.

The company tried to be visible during the Covid, we saw some activities and suddenly no more sound and image… until two press releases in September. The last one published doesn’t have any Excelero quote in it. We discovered a last announcement issued very recently with a quote from Kirill Shoikhet listed as CTO. Bizarre as the CTO is (was) Yaniv Romem, co-founder of the company. There is a divergence here between the leadership page of the company and the press release. Yaniv Romem continues to list his CTO role at Excelero on his LinkedIn page. But it could be a double move with Kirill moving as CTO and Yaniv as CEO.

The company appointed Henri Richard, former EVP at NetApp, as a board advisor, as it was announced mid -July.

So what does it mean? Difficulties, new mission, pivot, capital injection which required leadership changes?

Excelero has an interesting installed base and partnerships and may trigger some moves. Among its technology partners there are some interesting names: AMD, Broadcom, Dell, HPE, Intel, Kioxia, Lenovo, Mellanox, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Supermicro and Western Digital. Some of them already develop a NVMe-oF strategy and products with acquisitions but others really need something…

It’s also an opportunity for competitors to investigate some installed base swap. And it will not be suprising to see Excelero reappear somewhere as the current situation could be a sign of a bargain…

And it’s too late to hook Intel as the giant picked Lightbits Labs signing a deep partnership.