Over $32 Million in Funding for Israeli Stealthy Start-Up Weka.IO
Software-defined storage to scale storage to hundreds of petabytes, tens of millions of IO/s, sub milliseconds latency.
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on June 9, 2016 at 4:18 pmWeka.IO LTD announced the closing of series B funding, with participation from Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, Gemini Israel Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, WRV II, L.P. and several individual investors.
This new investment round brings the total capital raised to over $32 million to date.
The new funding will be used to accelerate Weka.IO’s go-to-market strategy, with plans to expand sales and marketing in the USA. The company will also apply the funds to continue building an engineering team in Tel Aviv, Israel and San Jose, USA.
“Weka.IO’s differentiated solution will change the economics of high performance storage. This highly disruptive technology is the work of a world class team with a successful track record of building highly differentiated storage systems,” said Lip-Bu Tan, chairman, Walden International. “With a product portfolio that will address tens of billions of dollars in market opportunity, Weka.IO represents a strong investment for us.”
“We invest in companies that are building highly disruptive technologies,” said Quinn Li, VP and head of Qualcomm Ventures. “The Weka.IO team has strong expertise in storage systems and we look forward to supporting them in their mission to re-define how storage is deployed.”
“The infusion of capital enables Weka.IO to further innovate with differentiated products and bring to market the next generation releases of software to expand the use cases and addressable market,” said Michael Raam, president and CEO, Weka.IO. “The funds will also be utilized to grow our customer support and business teams in multiple geographical locations.”
The patent-pending Weka.IO technology scales storage to hundreds of petabytes, tens of millions of IO/s, with sub milliseconds latency at cloud economics.
The technology is enabling Weka.IO customers to achieve higher levels of efficiencies at a TCO that has not been possible with legacy storage technologies.
Weka.IO software-defined storage technology is transforming enterprise and cloud storage by simplifying the way storage is deployed in the datacenter.
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More on the start-up
After a $22.5 million series B round included in the total of $32.5 million here announced, Weka.IO, launched three years ago, completed a $10 million series A in 2014 from Gemini Israel Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.
Most of the executives come from XIV (or IBM XIV), acquired by IBM for $300 million in 2008.
President and CEO Michael Raam is board's advisor of Nantero and Talena and worked formerly at EnVerv, Micron technology, LSI, Sandforce and AMCC.
Co-founder and CTO Liran Zvibel was architect at IBM XIV.
Maor Ben Dayan is another co-founder formerly project leader at IBM XIV.
Nir Makovski, VP R&D, was managing Intel SW Wigig Group.
VP product management Omri Palmon was XIV global marketing and product manager and then also at IBM XIV.
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