Portworx, a provider of storage and data management software for containers, has announced a $27 million (£20.5m) series C funding round – and touted record revenue and customer growth in the process.

The company’s series C, putting its total funding at $55.5m, was co-led by Sapphire Ventures and the venture arm of Mubadala Investment Company, with new investors Cisco Investments, HPE and NetApp joining Mayfield Fund and GE Ventures in the round.

The company noted its customer base had expanded by more than 100%, with total bookings going up 50% just between the third and fourth quarters of 2018. Among the new customers are HPE, with the infrastructure giant eating its own dog food in the funding stakes by investing after purchasing the Portworx Enterprise Platform.

Portworx also took the opportunity to unveil the latest flavour of its platform, Portworx Enterprise 2.1. New features include enhanced disaster recovery as well as a role-based security option, with organisations able to access controls on a per-container volume basis integrated with corporate authorisation and authentication.

The opportunity for Portworx and other companies of their ilk is a big one. As this publication noted in September, a study from the company noted more than two thirds of companies were ‘making investment’ in containers, noting that the enterprise had caught up. Ronald Sens, director at A10 Networks, noted at the time that while Kubernetes is “clearly becoming the de facto standard”, certain areas, such as application load balancing, are not part of their service.

“Kubernetes alone is not sufficient to handle critical data services that power enterprise applications,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder of Portworx in a statement. “Portworx cloud-native storage and data management solutions enable enterprises to run all their applications in containers in production.

“With this investment round the cloud-native industry recognises Portworx and its incredible team as the container storage and data management leader,” Thirumale added. “Our customer-first strategy continues to pay off.”

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