Latest investment round proves to be quite productive

Nov 1, 2011 13:57 GMT  ·  By

SolidFire shares half of its name with that of solid state drives, understandable given its occupation, and it seems that it is going to start pushing harder on the cloud storage market segment.

SolidFire has been looking for investors to add their support to its business.

What the company does is create and market systems which are meant to be used in cloud storage applications.

What sets SolidFire apart from other companies that do this is the fact that it utilizes only solid state drives when it builds said systems.

Actually advertising and marketing these all-SSD systems takes funds, however.

Fortunately, SolidFire was able to impress, among others, NEA, Valhalla Partners, and Novak Biddle enough that they invested $25 million in the latest (second) funding round, 18.26 Euro as it were.

“This new funding round and the continued commitment of our initial investors show that they recognize the potential that SolidFire has in this market with an all-SSD storage system optimized for the cloud,” said Dave Wright, SolidFire founder and CEO.

“The response to our Early Access Program launched only this summer has been overwhelming. We have a very solid sales pipeline and we will be investing in our sales and marketing team to respond to customer interest and accelerate our growth.”

Right now, SolidFire has a total funding of $37 million, which is about the same as 27 million Euro.

Individual investments contributed to the final sum, from Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D., former VP and CTO of Sun Microsystems, Frank Slootman, former CEO of Data Domain, and David Schneider, former VP of Worldwide Sales at Data Domain.

“As an early investor, we are pleased to see the progress that SolidFire made this past year,” said Charles Curran, Valhalla general partner.

“They have Early Access systems deployed with some of the world’s largest cloud service providers and the customer feedback has been excellent.”