Press release

WekaIO Raises $31.7 Million in Series C Funding

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Sponsored by Businesswire

WekaIO,
the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for
data-intensive applications, today announced it has closed $31.7 million
in a Series C funding round fueled by existing investors and new
strategic investors from the storage industry, including Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE), Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA, Seagate, and Western
Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital Corp.
(WDC), alongside Qualcomm which invested previously. The new funding
brings the company’s total capital raised to $66.7 million.

WekaIO plans to use the investment primarily to support the continued
acceleration of its market trajectory and international business
expansion through increased investments in engineering, sales, and
marketing, giving WekaIO Matrix™ clear market advantage in addressing
data intensive applications at scale in key verticals including
artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), life sciences,
finance and engineering.

Matrix, the world’s fastest file system and WekaIO’s flagship product,
is widely used by customers with I/O intensive workloads commonly found
in AI, ML, high velocity analytics, and high-performance computing
(HPC). WekaIO delivers its patented software on pre-engineered solutions
with HPE, Supermicro, and Western Digital or it can be installed on any
industry-standard Intel x86-based server or used on the AWS Cloud to
deliver enterprise grade HPC at cloud-scale economics. The company’s
capacity-based pricing model allows customers to start small and scale
as their needs grow. Matrix tightly integrates object storage for best
economics at scale and supports features such as snapshots, cloud backup
and disaster recovery, alongside multiprotocol support including NFS and
SMB. The NVMe-optimized and POSIX-compliant file system delivers the
industry’s leading performance and the lowest latency, as measured by
independent SPEC
SFS 2014
benchmark testing and VI4IO’s 10
Node Challenge list
.

“This latest round of financing sets the stage for substantial growth
and allows us to continue our mission to deliver an enterprise grade HPC
storage solution at cloud scale economics,” says Liran Zvibel, CEO and
co-founder of WekaIO. “Modern workloads need a modern file system and
legacy solutions just can’t keep pace. In under two years since our
launch from stealth, we’ve been lauded with industry awards and
accolades, been validated in production environments with leading
enterprise organizations, and broken records on industry leading
benchmark tests beating out some of the world’s largest supercomputers.
This additional capital will allow us to increase our presence worldwide
and continue to innovate in order to exceed the evolving needs of our
customers.”

“We are seeing an explosion of artificial intelligence, machine and
deep learning along with high-performance computing in the enterprise
market,” said Paul Glaser, Head of Pathfinder, HPE. “By combining HPE’s
industry-leading server architecture with WekaIO’s performance-leading
software in an integrated, tested and validated package, we can deliver
best of breed solutions to our customers. This is a great example of
HPE’s Pathfinder program that seeks to partner with emerging companies
that are strategically aligned with HPE to drive innovative customer
solutions and benefits.”

“We have been demonstrating performance improvements for mutual
customers with WekaIO since they launched from stealth in 2017. The
combination of Matrix software and Mellanox Ethernet and InfiniBand
adapters delivers a high-performance storage solution that can address a
broad range of use cases in AI, machine learning, High Performance
Computing and high velocity analytics,” commented Nimrod Gindi, Senior
Vice President of M&A and Head of Investments, Mellanox Technologies.
“We are enthusiastic to support WekaIO in this round of funding to
encourage the development of emerging technologies, like Matrix.”

“As the world leader in accelerated computing, NVIDIA is at the
forefront of AI innovation,” added Jeff Herbst, Vice President of
Business Development, NVIDIA. “WekaIO has pioneered an impressive modern
parallel file system that delivers important capabilities to accelerate
AI and workloads at scale—with high throughput, high bandwidth and low
latency data access to GPU-based servers.”

“With the increase of data-hungry and low latency AI applications in
the enterprise, we anticipate that the combination of WekaIO’s
cutting-edge NVMe solutions tiered to S3 data pools on Seagate’s Multi
Actuator based storage products will provide unparalleled scale,
performance and TCO. We are excited to partner with WekaIO, and look
forward to a close relationship,” said Ravi Naik, Senior Vice President
of Corporate Strategy & CIO, Seagate. “Seagate’s mission is to maximize
data’s potential, so we are excited to support the development of
NVMe-native file systems like WekaIO Matrix that were built from the
ground up to maximize the efficiencies of flash to support these modern
workloads.”

WekaIO was awarded Gartner
Cool Vendor
, a spot in Silicon Review’s 10 Fastest Growing Storage
Companies list, the Artificial Intelligence
Excellence Award
and the AIConics
Award
. These achievements highlight the company’s continued industry
momentum to deliver unmatched HPC-class storage with enterprise-level
features and services, all in one solution, that provides IT with a
robust platform to support data-intensive applications.

About WekaIO

WekaIO helps companies manage, scale and futureproof their data center
so they can solve real problems that impact the world. WekaIO Matrix™,
the world’s fastest shared parallel file system and WekaIO’s flagship
product, leapfrogs legacy storage infrastructures by delivering
simplicity, scale, and the best performance density per U, for a
fraction of the cost. In the cloud or on-premises, WekaIO’s NVMe-native
high-performance software-defined storage solution removes the barriers
between the data and the compute layer, thus accelerating artificial
intelligence, machine learning, genomics, research, and analytics
workloads.

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