NextIO today announced it has closed a Series F funding round of $12.3 million. This round included investment by existing investors and an undisclosed strategic investor. NextIO, which demonstrated significant growth in 2011, will use the new funds to further expand sales and marketing efforts and to further expand NextIO’s family of I/O consolidation solutions.
“Our investors have a strong history of successful investments in companies at the forefront of a number of technologies. This investment is important not only as a source of capital, but as a vote of confidence in our strategy for datacenter I/O consolidation,” said K.C. Murphy, President and CEO of NextIO. “After a very successful 2011 built around our vCORE and vNET product lines, we intend to double our revenue in 2012. Closing this funding is a critical step to achieving that goal, as it allows us to take our I/O consolidation solutions and marketing strategies to the next level in the U.S. and throughout the world.”
NextIO’s customer base includes technology leaders in a variety of markets, including managed service providers, internet service providers, aerospace, automotive technologies, oil and gas, government, and finance. In 2011 alone, several hundred NextIO I/O consolidation systems were installed into these customers worldwide. NextIO will use the capital from the Series F funding round to grow both its worldwide go-to-market efforts and its product portfolio to further increase revenue and market penetration in 2012 and 2013.
“NextIO’s I/O consolidation products are achieving impressive market penetration in the multi-billion dollar datacenter networking market,” said George Ugras, General Partner at Adams Capital Management. “The explosion of data and the migration to the cloud presents a great opportunity in this market, and NextIO is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these trends as customers look for next-generation networking solutions. The customer adoption to date has validated the value proposition for NextIO’s products, so we felt this was the right time to further invest in the company and capitalize on the tremendous demand we are seeing.”
NextIO’s portfolio of rack-level I/O consolidation solutions includes products for datacenter network consolidation, GPGPU computing, and high-performance storage. The newest product in the NextIO portfolio is the vNET I/O Maestro, which provides server connectivity at the rack level to both Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks without the need for changes in governance models or proprietary, hard to support I/O drivers. The result is the elimination of expensive 10Gb Ethernet NICs, Fibre Channel HBA, multiple top-of-rack leaf switches, and an up to 80% reduction in the number of cables at the back of the rack. By simplifying server I/O, the vNET I/O Maestro significantly reduces CapEx, power consumption and cooling, while providing the ability to dynamically reconfigure I/O resources across servers as the needs in the datacenter evolve due to business conditions.
