Lightbits Raised $42 Million in Growth Capital

Lightbits Labs, Ltd. raised $42 million in growth capital.

New investor Atreides Management led the round, alongside J.P. Morgan, Valor Equity Partners, Eyal Ofer’s O.G. Tech, founder and chairman of Pacific Century Group (PCG) Richard Li, existing investors, and others.

With this financing, the company has raised more than $100 million since its founding in 2016. 

“In today’s data-driven market, enterprise and data center customers are increasingly focused on achieving superior performance, scalability, and economics. Lightbits has established itself as a clear leader in disaggregated storage solutions-poised to meet accelerated customer demand with its cloud-native data platform. We are excited to partner with the Lightbits team at a critical stage in the company’s growth trajectory,” said Gavin Baker, manager partner and chief investment officer, Atreides Management LP.

The new investment will be used to fuel the growth of start-up’s Cloud Data Platform, as the company invests in innovation and expansion. Founded by the inventors of the NVMe/TCP standard, the company introduced a disaggregated, composable block storage for any cloud: private clouds, public clouds, and edge clouds. Lightbits works with existing OSs, networking, and any hardware-simplifying storage for hybrid multi-cloud implementations on bare metal, VMware, Kubernetes, or OpenStack environments. The native NMVe/TCP architecture, coupled with Intelligent Flash Management, solves the complexity and high-cost problems endemic in data centers today. 

“The unprecedented events of the past two years and the impact of strained supply chains, have organizations thinking differently about their data infrastructure, rapidly accelerating the adoption of cloud solutions. There is tremendous pressure on cloud service providers  (CSPs) and IT organizations with private clouds to profitably keep pace with growing business demand while providing fast, resilient, and secure services,” said Avigdor Willenz, co-founder and chairman, Lightbits. “Lightbits invented NVMe/TCP and has led the way in defining a cloud-native storage architecture that is simple, agile, and efficient. Delivering these benefits improves the competitive advantage of our enterprise customers. This investment and our continued growth are validation of our strategy, our incredible team, and our mission to lead the cloud-native data center transformation by delivering scalable and efficient SDS that is easy to consume.” 

The firm eliminates storage complexities, unlike other NVMe-oF implementations that require FC or RDMA via the RoCE protocol, with specialized network interface cards and drivers. It’s simple, flexible, and easy to deploy at scale on ubiquitous TCP/IP networks, requiring no special hardware, NICs, drivers, or hypervisor on the storage nodes. Today, it is used by many Fortune 1000 organizations, including several of the largest financial services companies, e-commerce providers, webscalers, and CSPs in response to growing business demand for fast, resilient, and secure cloud services that maximize profitability and improve margins. 

“The demands of digital transformation, under way at more than 90% of companies, are driving a need for increased agility, performance, and capacity in storage systems, which in turn has driven broad deployment of cloud services and NVMe-based solid-state storage in enterprises,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC. “Software-defined, disaggregated enterprise storage solutions like Lightbits provide a great foundation for cloud service providers that need to provide agile and performant storage services for their own customers, and the fact that Lightbits has the most mature NVMe over TCP implementation in the market further helps their “cost-effective performance” story.”

Lightbits was recently awarded Storage Innovation Of The Year, BIG Innovation Award, Tech Trailblazer in Storage, Big50 Start-up, and Coldago Research GEMS 2022.