Kaminario Closes $15 Million Round

Kaminario, provider of high performance SSD storage, has closed a $15 million series C funding round.

New investor Globespan Capital Partners was joined in the round by current investors Sequoia Capital and Pitango Venture Capital.

Founded in 2008, this latest round brings Kaminario’s total funding to $34 million.

In addition, the company announced that Venky Ganesan, managing director, Globespan Capital Partners, will join Kaminario’s Board of Directors.

In July 2010, Kaminario introduced the K2 high performance storage appliance, an SSD storage solution to deliver performance and high availability. The K2 is currently being used by financial services firms, Web media companies, telecommunications companies and government agencies. The additional investment funds will be used to expand the K2 product line, sales distribution channels and marketing.

"Since the K2’s introduction, we have seen the demand for our unique enterprise-class SSD storage grow continuously. We continue to attract customers of all sizes with one thing in common, an application where storage performance directly impacts their business," said Dani Golan, co-founder and CEO of Kaminario. "This new funding will allow us to expand our reach in the market and help more customers solve their application performance problems."

Kaminario K2 Based on an Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture (SPEAR), the Kaminario K2 uses off-the-shelf blade servers and SSD media to create a fast, highly available and easy-to-deploy distributed storage grid appliance. The Kaminario K2 is ab SSD storage solution that delivers both enterprise-class performance and high availability, without the cost and complexity of managing multiple SSD storage devices.

"The market for SSD storage is growing at a tremendous rate, but very few of these vendors can address true enterprise storage requirements," said Venky Ganesan, managing partner, Globespan. "Kaminario offers a revolutionary new approach, combining SSD performance with enterprise-class features that will allow mainstream applications to safely take full advantage of this exciting technology. We’re very excited to be partnering with Kaminario."

This recent round of funding is yet another positive milestone for the company. Since launching the Kaminario K2 last year, the company has been:

• Named a Cool Vendor in Storage by the Gartner Group.
• Named by InfoStor as a Top Ten Storage Startup.
• Named a finalist in the 2011 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards by Network Products Guide.
• Praised by numerous storage analyst groups including ESG, Taneja Group and the Kusnetzky Group for its innovative approach to high performance storage.

"Every year, there are new companies that come into the storage market. Kaminario, by offering a revolutionary, scalable enterprise solution to a pressing business issue – slow application performance – stands out from the pack. Kaminario is in a strong position to help businesses of all sizes solve this problem and become a leader in the enterprise storage market," said Haim Sadger, managing partner, Sequoia Capital.

"Kaminario has developed a revolutionary enterprise storage architecture specifically designed to take advantage of the new SSD media available in the market," said Aaron Mankovski, managing partner, Pitango Venture Capital. "The Kaminario approach delivers on the needs every company has for performance, availability and cost-effective scalability. We are glad to support them in bringing this solution to a broad audience."