22 Financial Rounds for Storage Start-Ups at Mid-Year 2017
To be compared to 41 for full year 2016
By Jean Jacques Maleval | June 28, 2017 at 2:45 pmSince January 2017, storage start-ups accumulated a total of 22 financial rounds for a total raised reaching $728.1 million or an average $33.1 million.
On average, a company got historically $45 million in total funding until 2016, the amount per round being $18 million.
The trend is similar as there were 41 financial rounds in full year 2016, but for $947.2 million or a lower average of $23.1 million per round.
VCs continue to be more reluctant to invest in storage these last two years. 2016 was globally the worst year for start-ups, about twice less rounds than the former year and with the lowest figure in term of cumulative investment since 2003. 2017 could be only a little better
The highest round was $180 million for Rubrik this year. It was $77 million for Upthere in 2016, $175 million for Simplivity in 2015, and as much as $900 million for Cloudera in 2014.
Largest financial rounds in 2017
(at $70 million and more)
Start-ups | Amount raised in $million |
Rubrik | 180 |
Cohesity | 90 |
Kaminario | 75 |
By country, companies getting financial funding came for the vast majority from USA (18), then France (2, Canada (1) and China (1).
There were two IPOs in 2016: Nutanix getting $238 million after $370 million in total financial funding, and EverSpin Technologies raising $40 million after $45 million investment. Since January 2017, only one, Cloudera, became public getting $225 million on the stock exchange market following $1.041 million invested by VCs. Another IPO is expected soon from for Tintri hoping to raise $100 million after getting $260 million in financial funding.
Only 2 start-ups did find buyers in 2016, 13 in 2015, and 6 in 2017 including two big deals by HPE to hope to finally increase its storage revenue.
Acquired start-ups in 2017
Acquired start-up | Buyer | Price in $ million |
Nimble Storage | HPE | 1,090 |
Simplivity | HPE | 650 |
Exablox | StorageCraft | NA |
Plexistor | NetApp | NA |
Syncplicity | Axway | NA |
Violin Memory | Quantum Partners (Soros) | NA |
Formation Data Systems and outpace.ioc closed doors in 2017, as well aso two (ClusterHQ, InterModal Data) last year.
All Financial Rounds in 2017
Start-Ups | Born in | CEO | Amount raised in 2017 in $ million |
Total raised in $ million |
Activity |
Avere Systems (Pittsburg, PA) | 2008 | Ron Bianchini | 14 | 97 | tiered NAS apppliances |
Bitglass (Campbell, CA) | 2013 | Nat Kausik | 45 | 80 | data protection on cloud for mobile devices |
CNEX Labs (San Jose, CA) | 2013 | Alan Armstrong | 23 | 60 | NVMe PCIe SSD controller |
Cohesity (Santa Clara, CA) | 2013 | Mohit Aron | 90 | 190 | web-scale, converged storage to unify backup, DevOps, and analytics |
Diamanti (San Jose, CA) | 2014 | Jeff Chou | 18 | 30.5 | network and storage solutions for Linux containers; formerly Datawise.io |
Diamond (San Mateo, CA) |
Pierre Arys | single access point for all cloud-based email, storage services and personal devices | |||
Hedvig (Santa Clara, CA) | 2012 | Avinash Lakshman | 21.5 | 52 | software-defined storage system for cloud |
Kaminario (Needham, MA) | 2008 | Dani Golan | 75 | 218 | all-flash arrays; R&D in Israel |
Komprise (Campbell, CA) | 2014 | Kumar Goswami | 12 | 18 | software using analytics-driven adaptive automation to manage massive data growth transparently across all storage silos |
Leonovus (Ottawa, Canada) | 2008 | Michael Gaffney | 1.3 | software-defined object storage solution | |
Liqid (Lafayette, CO) | 2013 | Jay Breakstone | 10 | 20 | on-demand composable infrastructure |
Oodrive (Paris, France) | 2000 | Stanislas de Réaumur | 69 | storage provider with SaaS platform; acquired Active Circle in 2014 | |
Panzura (Campbell, CA) | 2008 | Patrick Harr | 32 | 60 | cloud as a storage tier integrated into interwoven global file system and global namespace |
Portworx (San Francisco, CA) | 1983 | Murli Thirumale | 20 | 28.5 | software-defined infrastructure for containerized applications |
Qumulo (Seattle, WA) | 2012 | Bill Richter | 30 | 130 | modern scale-out file storage |
Reduxio Systems (San Francisco, CA) | 2012 | Mark Weiner | 22.5 | 47.5 | enterprise hybrid storage with one-second data recovery, in-line in-memory de-dupe and compression and block-level tiering; also in Petach Tikvah, Israel |
Rubrik (Palo Alto, CA) | 2014 | Bipul Sinha | 180 | 292 | scale-out storage architecture for backup |
Storj Labs (Atlanta, GA) | 2014 | Shawn Wilkinson | 3 | 5.4 | decentralized, end-to-end encrypted cloud storage solution to use blockchain technology and cryptography to secure files |
Tegile Systems (Newark, CA) | 2009 | Rohit Kshetrapal | 33 | 178 | multi-protocol SSD/HDD array with de-dupe for primary storage |
Ugloo (Amiens, France) | 2015 | Christophe Laire | 1.3 | 1.9 | backup solution of distributed data |
Wasabi Technologies (Boston, MA) | 2016 | David Friend | 8.5 | 8.5 | formerly BlueArchive; cloud-based storage as a service |
XSky (Hong Kong, China) | 2015 | Xin Xu | 17 | 27 | distributed block storage solution for enterprises and carrier grade software-defined-storage product for cloud service providers and private cloud customers |