California-based enterprise data storage company Cloudian has raised £72 million in a series E funding round, which the company touts as the “largest single round to date for a distributed file systems and object storage provider”.
This investment round saw investments from Goldman Sachs, Japan Post Investment Corporation, Digital Alpha and Eight Roads Ventures.
Cloudian specialises in object storage technology, which essentially bundles the data itself along with metadata tags and a unique identifier rather than as files organised into a hierarchy. The funding round came as the enterprise storage market continues to boom, growing 34.4 percent in the first quarter of 2018, according to IDC.
Daniel Auerbach, senior managing partner at Eight Roads Ventures said in an emailed release: “When Eight Roads Ventures first invested in Cloudian in 2014 we saw a different approach – here was a company applying cloud-scale technologies to the enterprise storage challenge. This, our third round of investment, affirms our belief in Cloudian’s innovative approach and next stage of growth.”
Cloudian’s Hyperstore gives users the means to store their data in the cloud and run data analytics on it with no minimum block size requirement.
The data can also be compressed in the back-end without altering the format.
Cloudian’s HyperFile offering meanwhile allows users to consolidate unstructured data into a scalable and searchable format.
Data Storage Funding
Takayuki Inagawa, CEO of NTT DOCOMO, who invested in this round, commented in the release on the changing nature of enterprise and computer systems stating that: “Computing now operates without physical boundaries, and customers need storage solutions that also span from the data centre to the edge.”
“Cloudian’s geo-distributed architecture creates a global fabric of storage assets that supports the next generation of connected devices,” Takayuki Inagawa added.
The company says its software-defined-storage platform transforms standard servers and virtual machines into a “pool of logical storage resources that can be co-located with data sources and data consumers, whether in physical data centres, at remote sites, or in the cloud.”
