Scality has secured $45m in its latest funding round and plans to go public in 2017
Software-defined storage expert Scality has secured $45m in a funding round led by Menlo Ventures, which the company said will be used to fuel its North American and international expansion.
Scality’s offering uses object storage to abstract underlying hardware to create a single pool of storage that can be manipulated with a wide range of protocols and technologies (SMB, Linux FS, OpenStack Swift, etc.).
The company, which offers storage software and has large reseller agreements in place with big box vendors like HP and Dell, has secured over $80m since its founding in 2009. It claims over 50 per cent of the server market is now reselling its SDS software.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that today, Scality is the biggest disruptor of the traditional storage industry, and I am extremely excited to witness their progression,” said Douglas C. Carlisle, managing director at Menlo Ventures.
“Their innovative storage model is meeting demand for scale like no other product on the market, and is poised to keep up with the steep incline in data volumes. With Jerome’s forward-thinking mindset, we expect to see Scality continue to be a trailblazer and to take its RING technology to the next level.”
The company has spent the better part of the past two years scaling up its operations in Asia and Europe, but it said the new funding will go towards bolstering its North American presence, with a view towards releasing and IPO in 2017.
“Over the course of the last year-and-a-half, we’ve seen an unprecedented amount of funding given to software storage startups. At the same time, we’ve seen the traditional storage vendors lose market share, change leadership and shift their business model to mimic the software-defined strategy. This latest funding round comes at a time when Scality and the software-defined storage industry are poised to attract billions of dollars from customers that are rethinking their storage strategies,” said Jerome Lecat, chief executive at Scality.
“Our employees and partners believe in us, and the fact that this last funding round was done at 2x valuation speaks volumes about the overall confidence in the future of Scality. This new capital investment will allow us to massively boost our go-to-market, attract strategic new hires, continue to expand globally, and be primed for a successful IPO by 2017,” Lecat said.