Pliops Raises $30 Million in Series B, Total Reaching $40 Million

Pliops received a $30 million series B funding led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, with participation from all series A investors including Intel Capital, State of Mind Ventures (SOMV) and Viola Ventures, along with strategic investors Western Digital Capital and Xilinx Inc.

The oversubscribed round brings the total invested to date to $40 million, including the October 2017 Series A funding of $10 million.

The start-up will use the funds to accelerate development of its storage processor technology for cloud storage and database applications, including expansion of its teams in the US, Israel and China.

Recently-appointed president and chief business officer Steve Fingerhut, based in San Jose, CA, will spearhead global expansion and oversee the company’s product debut planned for mid-2019.

With an executive team from industry leaders including Amazon, Apple, Intel and Samsung, Pliops has developed technology that solves the scalability challenges raised by the cloud data explosion and the increasing data requirements of AI and machine learning applications.

Stored data is growing much faster than current data center approaches can scale to efficiently manage, creating a storage bottleneck that impacts performance across the entire cloud data center market. The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.3% in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018, according to Gartner, Inc.

With eight core patents pending to date, the Pliops storage processor allows cloud databases like MySQL or Cassandra deployed on disaggregated flash to scale more efficiently via a 90% reduction in compute load, a 20x reduction in network traffic, a 50x improvement to latency and over 10x application throughput.

The product delivers step function improvements across compute, networking and storage infrastructure to enable more scalable and cost effective cloud services.

Organizations whose core business is experiencing rapid storage growth can benefit from this offering, which uses standard APIs to integrate with major cloud databases, as well as big data, SDS, HCI, HPC, telco, edge and AFA architectures.

“Businesses must scale their infrastructures in the face of skyrocketing data volumes, and we’re excited to help them,” said Uri Beitler, CEO and co-founder. “Pliops’ technology transforms storage so that organizations achieve more consistent, readily-scaled performance with a simplified software stack. We are proud to have achieved the backing of such esteemed leading investors and to see early market traction. We look forward to sharing more about our flagship product in the coming months.“

“Pliops is solving a critical problem for database and storage architects – and doing it in a way that is both elegantly simple and amazingly efficient,” said JP Lee, CEO and managing partner, SoftBank Ventures Asia. “There is tremendous pent-up demand worldwide for solutions that enable next-generation data centers to perform and scale more efficiently, particularly in large cloud providers’ environments. Pliops’ architecture enables order of magnitude improvements in performance and even greater price/performance gains. We’re delighted to welcome the company to the SoftBank Ventures Asia portfolio.”

“Pliops’ core technology helps to accelerate the cloud and AI workloads that are driving the next wave of innovations,” said Wendell Brooks, senior VP of Intel Corporation and president of Intel Capital. “Intel is investing in numerous technologies to meet the rapidly growing storage and processing needs of the most challenging applications. This investment in Pliops advances Intel’s vision to develop the most efficient, scalable data center solutions.”

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By Jean Jacques Maleval – November 9, 2018