WekaIO, a high-performance scalable file storage company, announced it has closed $31.7 million in Series C funding. Existing investors and new strategic investors in the industry participated in this round including Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Mellanox Technologies, NVIDIA, Seagate, and Western Digital Capital. Existing investor Qualcomm also joined this round. Including this round, WekaIO raised a total of $66.7 million.
“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,” said WekaIO co-founder and CEO Liran Zvibel. “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.”
With this funding round, WekaIO is going to invest primarily to support the continued acceleration of its market trajectory and international business expansion through increased investments in engineering, sales, and marketing. This gives WekaIO Matrix a clear market advantage in addressing data intensive applications at scale in key verticals including AI, machine learning, life sciences, finance, and engeering.
“We are seeing an explosion of artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning along with high-performance computing in the enterprise market,” added HPE’s Head of Pathfinder Paul Glaser. “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.”
Matrix is considered one of the fastest file systems in the world. And WekaIO’s flagship product is widely used by customers with I/O intensive workloads commonly found in AI, machine learning, high velocity analytics, and high-performance computing. Plus 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 for delivering enterprise grade HPC at cloud-scale economics.
“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,” Mellanox Technologies’ SVP of M&A and Head of Investments Nimrod Gindi commented. “We are enthusiastic to support WekaIO in this round of funding to encourage the development of emerging technologies, like Matrix.”
WekaIO’s capacity-based pricing model allows customers to start small and scale as the needs grow. And Matrix tightly integrates object storage for best economics at scale. Plus it supports features like 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.
“As the world leader in accelerated computing, NVIDIA is at the forefront of AI innovation,” explained NVIDIA’s VP of Business Development Jeff Herbst. “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.”
WekaIO has won a number of accolades. Last year, WekaIO was awarded Gartner Cool Vendor 2018 and a spot in Silicon Review’s 10 Fastest Growing Storage Companies list. Plus it also received the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award and the AIConics Award.
“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,” noted Seagate’s SVP of Corporate Strategy and CIO Ravi Naik. “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.”
