Portworx Got $20 Million in Oversubscribed B Round, Total at $28.5 Million

Portworx, Inc., provider of container data services for DevOps, raised $20 million in an oversubscribed series B funding round.

The company also announced major customers – GE Digital, Lufthansa Systems GmbH & Co. KG, University of Toronto and Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) – proving strong demand for enterprise container data services.

The funding round was led by Sapphire Ventures, with new investors including GE Ventures. Mayfield Fund, LLC and other series A investors also contributed.

The round brings total funding to $28.5 million.

Portworx will use this new funding to ramp up enterprise sales and deliver new key features in the product roadmap, such as data encryption and access controls, hybrid and multi-cloud data management, and deeper integration with container schedulers such as Kubernentes, Docker Swarm and Mesosphere.

Container demand is growing, but large enterprises adopting stateful containers in production encounter data management challenges in the areas of persistence, HA, security, automation and multi-cloud deployments. The company addresses these challenges head on and has emerged as the go-to solution for container data management, as evidenced by its deployment in a growing number of Fortune 2000 enterprises; GE is using Portworx in its Predix solution, the next-generation platform for the IoT.

“Platforms like GE Predix represent the latest in cloud engineering – and operate in some of the largest distributed cloud configurations in the world. Portworx helps address our complex DevOps challenges by allowing us to rapidly enable data affinity solutions for containers, while improvinsg data availability and scalability,” said Darren Haas, head of cloud engineering, GE Digital. “Portworx provides infrastructure-agnostic features such as volume persistence, HA, data security and automation that are valuable to a business like GE Digital.”

Portworx is also adding members to its board of directors as a result of this new funding round. Jai Das, MD of Sapphire Ventures, joins the board with over 15 years of experience helping companies innovate their product and marketing strategies to scale and become market leaders. Abhishek Shukla, director of GE Ventures and former member of Cisco’s Corporate Development & Ventures Investments, offers the board insight and expertise in cloud, big data, artificial intelligence and key technologies in the GE Digital portfolio.

“There is a lot of hype around containers today, but we believe there are a select few container-focused companies that have breakthrough technology and significant customers, and Portworx is one of them. From our perspective, the company is paving the way in data management for the new container infrastructure stack,” said Das. “Enterprises are heavily investing in container data services like Portworx because data is core to their business operations, and organizations need a reliable solution backed by enterprise storage experts.”

“Stateful container deployments will continue to accelerate and grow in enterprises,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder, Portworx. “Customers are adopting us rapidly because they recognize the depth of container and storage expertise packaged by Portworx in an easy-to-deploy solution. Container solution providers and enterprises are jumping on integrating data services like Portworx, and we look forward to partnering with vendors and customers alike to solve container data problems at their core.”

Portworx provides scheduler-integrated data services for enterprises running containers in production. Users can easily deploy stateful containers on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid clouds. Unlike legacy storage with container connectors or systems built on key-value stores, the product is built for cloud-native applications, making container data portable, persistent and protected. This technology is suited for solution verticals such as databases, messaging queues, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CICD), big data and content management.

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by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2015.07.02 | News