Photo: Portworx
Los Altos, California-based cloud-native storage and data management company Portworx announced it raised $27 million in an oversubscribed Series C round of funding co-led by Sapphire Ventures and the venture arm of Mubadala Investment Company. Existing investors Mayfield Fund and GE Ventures also participated in this round along with new investors Cisco Investments, HPE, and NetApp. Including this round, Portworx has raised a total of $55.5 million.
“Kubernetes alone is not sufficient to handle critical data services that power enterprise applications,” said Portworx CEO and co-founder Murli Thirumale. “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 recognizes Portworx and its incredible team as the container storage and data-management leader. Our customer-first strategy continues to pay off!”
In the past year, Portworx expanded its customer base by more than 100%, including HPE — which purchased the Portworx Enterprise platform and subsequently invested in the company. Portworx also increased total bookings 50% from Q3 to Q4 2018 with 376% bookings growth year-on-year The company also increased its headcount by 81%. And some of the key hires that Portworx made recently include Sarvesh Jagannivas as chief marketing officer and Phil Simpson as director of business development.
NetApp’s VP of Technical Strategy Dave Wright pointed out that they are encouraged by innovation that helps customers harness the power of their data and “Portworx’s impressive customer growth demonstrates the need for enterprises to leverage containers to transform their business and run data-rich applications on the Kubernetes platform.”
With this funding round, Portworx is going to expand into new markets and continue developing its flagship Portworx Enterprise platform. Plus the company is going to grow its engineering, sales, and channels teams.
“Sapphire Ventures is increasing our investment in Portworx and co-leading their current financing since the Company is the only game in town when it comes to providing cloud native data management for enterprises building container-based applications and using Kubernetes for orchestration,” explained Sapphire Ventures president and managing director Jai Das. “Portworx has shown the way for enterprises to build and deploy truly critical, data-rich applications with tremendous data management and scaling needs on containers using Kubernetes for orchestration. We are thrilled to expand our investment in Portworx as they continue on such an important mission.”
Along with the funding news, Portworx also announced the release of its flagship cloud-native storage platform called Portworx Enterprise. Portworx Enterprise includes new capabilities for disaster recovery and data security.
“Enterprise application platforms like Kubernetes are gaining traction as enterprises look to go digital, but Kubernetes alone cannot handle some of the most pressing challenges modern businesses face, like data management, data security, disaster recovery and performance SLAs, severely limiting its adoption for mission-critical enterprise applications,” added Mubadala Ventures head Ibrahim Ajami. “We believe in Portworx’s mission to help enterprises run all their applications on Kubernetes by solving these important business requirements. We are looking forward to supporting Portworx for their next phase of growth.”
Portworx is partnered with some of the largest organizations including HPE, GE Digital, Lufthansa Systems, and 30 companies in the Fortune Global 2000 and government agencies — which validates the company’s unique value proposition as the only cloud-native storage solution that solves non-negotiable business requirements such as High Availability (HA), data security, multi-cloud data management, and disaster recovery in a fully automated way for Kubernetes-based applications.
“Large enterprises like HPE’s own IT team are quickly adopting cloud-native technologies to deliver applications more quickly and at scale,” noted HPE’s Chief Strategy Officer Vishal Lall. “Our use of the Portworx Enterprise platform has allowed HPE to execute faster, reduce costs and increase the quality of the data-rich applications our internal and external uses demand. Based on the value that we have experienced first hand, we are excited to invest in Portworx and support the company as it continues its impressive growth.”
Portworx recently hit its four-year anniversary and the company is continuing to see wide spreading and growing demand from enterprises that are looking to leverage containers for transforming their business — which led to a 400% year-over-year booking increase.
“Increasingly organizations are expanding their investments in containerized workloads to include mission-critical, data-rich applications,” Cisco’s SVP of Cloud Solutions and Platforms Kip Compton commented. “Portworx helps enterprises address the challenges presented by complex data management, security, performance, and disaster recovery. We are investing in Portworx to enable its best-in-class solution to help our customers take advantage of new technologies in today’s multi-cloud environments in conjunction with Cisco’s overall multi-cloud portfolio.”
