Premier global investors infuse $58 million into SimpliVity

SimpliVity Corporation, a pioneer in globally federated hyperconverged IT infrastructure, has secured $58 million in Series C funding co-led by existing investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) Growth and DFJ Growth, and joined by Meritech Capital Partners and Swisscom Ventures, as well as existing investors Accel and Charles River Ventures.

The funding follows a year in which SimpliVity emerged as a leader in the growing market for infrastructure for virtualised environments, on the strength of its game changing global data architecture—the first and only one that delivers inline, accelerated deduplication, compression, and optimisation of all data, once and forever, across a global federated framework that allows for the highly efficient movement, accessibility, and management of data around the globe. This transformational technology allows companies large and small to radically simplify their infrastructure environments while gaining 3X TCO savings, and achieving dramatic improvements in functionality, data protection, and manageability. 2013 saw the widespread market adoption of OmniCube around the globe as companies large and small recognised the opportunity to radically simplify and improve their IT infrastructure.

"SimpliVity is one of the biggest innovations in enterprise computing since VMware,” commented John Doerr, General Partner of Kleiner Perkins, and early backer of Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Google, and Amazon. “Its OmniCube is radically simplifying IT infrastructure with systems that are better, faster, smaller and less expensive than competitive offerings. SimpliVity is well positioned to transform IT.”

“We invest in category leaders addressing large market opportunities. SimpliVity offers breakthrough price/performance and unprecedented manageability for companies deploying virtual machine and cloud environments. As companies of all sizes continue their migration to virtualisation and cloud computing, we see a wonderful opportunity for SimpliVity’s products to be used as ‘Lego-like’ building blocks to build, expand and simplify IT operations in mid-size companies, large enterprises - especially those with remote offices -, and cloud service providers as well. Furthermore, we are extremely impressed with the sophistication and high level of professionalism of SimpliVity’s management team and their intense focus on making their customers successful,” commented Mark Bailey, Managing Director of DFJ Growth, investors in Box, Yammer, AdMob, Good Technology, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, SpaceX and other world-changing companies.

SimpliVity emerged from stealth mode in August 2012 with the introduction of OmniCube™, the world’s first, all-in-one, globally scalable IT infrastructure platform that delivers all requisite enterprise data centre functionality with extreme efficiency and ease of management. Deployed as simplified building blocks, each OmniCube delivers compute, hypervisor, storage, networking, cache accelerated performance, native VM-centric backup and replication for disaster recovery, and public cloud integration. The core underlying technology that enables OmniCube to deliver this value—and the catalyst for today’s funding—is OmniStack™, SimpliVity’s highly innovative and novel data architecture that combines inline, accelerated deduplication, compression and optimisation of all data, once and forever, with a global federated framework that the IT team can use to manage globally distributed nodes as a single, unified infrastructure system.

In addition to building out its customer base and channel network across the globe, SimpliVity recently achieved the top honor at VMworld, winning Gold for Best of VMworld 2013—further indication of the superiority of its unique and transformative data architecture technology.
OmniCube is currently installed across a wide range of companies and use cases—from small environments with dozens of virtual machines to some of the world’s largest global cloud providers that have hundreds of data centres around the globe. Swisscom, Switzerland's leading telecommunications provider and ranked as one of the leading Swiss providers specialising in the integration and operation of complex IT systems, recently selected OmniStack as the technology on which to standardise its cloud infrastructure. Gunther Thiel, Head of Cloud Products and Technology at Swisscom comments, "SimpliVity is an important step forward to achieving a truly software defined data centre. Specifically, its data mobility features are convincing and essential for our cloud strategy." Swisscom Ventures acquired a minority stake in the company as they see promising technology in SimpliVity’s portfolio.

The comprehensive functionality delivered in simple, building-block fashion has fueled OmniCube’s rapid market adoption. Jeremy Wheeler, Innovation Architect for Dairylea, one of the US’s largest dairy cooperatives, commented, “After months of analysing alternative infrastructure solutions, we discovered SimpliVity’s OmniCube and were quickly convinced. We recognised that SimpliVity’s innovative data architecture would offer superior functionality while allowing us to significantly reduce costs. Within 12 days, we decided to standardise on OmniCube for all of our virtualised workloads, and purchased our first 6 systems. OmniCube allowed us to replace our SAN environments in two sites, while introducing significant improvements to backup and DR—all at a price point lower than what we would have paid simply to deploy a new traditional backup system.”
Laura Dubois, Vice President for leading analyst firm IDC commented, “SimpliVity has done something truly unique in delivering a complete IT building block that is built around an entirely new architecture for storing and managing data globally. The significant traction the company has gained in a short time period indicates that this is truly transformative technology, and I expect SimpliVity’s market impact to accelerate as the company expands its operation with this new round of capital.”

SimpliVity will use the C-Round capital to support the continued hypergrowth of the company. Specifically, the company plans to significantly bolster the engineering team, allowing it to continue to deliver the features and functionality requested by existing and new customers. Additionally, SimpliVity will expand its service and support organisation, and its field team in order to manage the continued worldwide adoption of the technology. “We are very happy about the addition of DFJ Growth, Meritech and Swisscom to the SimpliVity family,” said Doron Kempel, CEO of SimpliVity. “We intend to use the funds in order to accelerate product development and all facets of our business, globally.”