SolidFire secures $82 million in Series D funding

SolidFire has closed an $82 million Series D round of funding, bringing its total funding to $150 million. New investor Greenspring Associates led the round along with a major sovereign wealth fund, with participation from current investors NEA, Novak Biddle, Samsung Ventures and Valhalla Partners. SolidFire will use the additional funds to extend its global reach and further advance its leading all-flash storage architecture.

SolidFire today also announced the expansion of its flagship SF Series product line, unveiling two new storage nodes that dramatically decrease the cost of entry to the company’s scale-out flash storage platform. The SF2405 and SF4805 nodes are the third-generation of SolidFire hardware to be released since the platform became generally available in November 2012. Both new nodes can be seamlessly integrated with any current SolidFire platform, delivering the full SolidFire feature set including guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS), complete system automation and scale-out storage design.

“Just as flash has disrupted the legacy disk storage market, SolidFire continues to disrupt the all-flash array market by delivering a storage platform that goes far beyond the basics of raw flash performance,” commented SolidFire’s Founder and CEO Dave Wright. “Additional funding allows us to continue to extend SolidFire’s technical advantages over the competition and will deepen our sales, marketing and channel enablement to meet the growing global demand for SolidFire’s leading all-flash storage architecture.”

“From SolidFire’s top rankings in independent industry analyst reports to its growing list of enterprise customers, SolidFire is shaking up the storage market,” said Harry Weller, a member of SolidFire’s board of directors and general partner at NEA, one of the world’s largest and most active venture capital firms that first invested in SolidFire in February 2011. “We welcome Greenspring Associates to the elite group of investors who recognize that SolidFire is revolutionizing the way the world uses the cloud.”

SolidFire continues to prove the maturity of its all-flash storage platform and capitalize on increasing demand within enterprise and service provider data centers worldwide. Additional highlights include:
· Received highest product score for overall use case in Gartner’s 2014 Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays¹ (3.43 out of 5) and was recognized as a Visionary in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays.2
· Grew revenue over 700 percent in 2013 and increased revenue over 50 percent quarter over quarter in 2014.
· Continued to expand its enterprise and service provider customer base, reaching approximately a 50:50 service provider/enterprise customer split over the last two quarters.
· Expanded its channel partner network to over 60 partners and four distributors, providing a global network of resellers covering Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and North America.
· Grew its employee base 150 percent in 2014 to over 250 people worldwide and is currently adding more than 30 additional staff.
· Broadened its reach in high-growth international markets, including opening new offices in Australia and Singapore to support increasing demand across the Asia-Pacific region.