Portworx Lands Oversubscribed $27 Million Series C

Portworx, Inc. announced the close of an oversubscribed $27 million series C funding round co-led by Sapphire Ventures and the ventures arm of Mubadala Investment Company in Abu Dhabi, UAE, with support from existing investors Mayfield Fund and GE Ventures, and new financing from Cisco Investments, HPE, and NetApp, Inc.

With a total of $55.5 million in financing to date, the company will use the latest round of funding to expand into new markets, continue developing its platform Portworx Enterprise, and grow its engineering, sales and channel teams.

On the heels of its four-year anniversary, it continues to see widespread and growing demand from enterprises looking to leverage containers to transform their business, leading to a nearly 400% Y/Y bookings increase.

Industry analysts validate this cloud-native growth, with IDC reporting global digital transformation spending will reach nearly $2 trillion by 2022. Overall, Portworx works with organizations including HPE, GE Digital, Lufthansa Systems and 30 members of the Fortune Global 2000 and government agencies, validating Portworx’s value proposition as a cloud-native storage solution that solves non-negotiable business requirements like HA , data security, multi-loud data management and DR in a fully-automated manner for Kubernetes-based applications.

Additional momentum and growth in the last year includes:
• Expanded customer base by over 100%, including HPE who purchased the Portworx Enterprise platform and subsequently invested
• Increased total bookings 50% from 3Q to 4Q18, with 376% bookings growth Y/Y.
• Grew headcount by 81%, with key executive hires including Sarvesh Jagannivas as CMO and Phil Simpson as director of business development
• Expanded partnerships and reseller agreements with companies including IBM, Intel, HPE, Toshiba, Red Hat and Mesosphere

“Kubernetes alone is not sufficient to handle critical data services that power enterprise applications,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO and cofounder, Portworx. “Portworx cloud-native storage and data management solutions enable enterprises to run all their applications in containers in production. With this investment round the cloud-native industry recognizes Portworx and its incredible team as the container storage and data-management leader. Our customer-first strategy continues to pay off.”

“Enterprise application platforms like Kubernetes are gaining traction as enterprises look to go digital, but Kubernetes alone cannot handle some of the most pressing challenges modern businesses face, like data management, data security, DR and performance SLAs, severely limiting its adoption for mission-critical enterprise applications,” said Ibrahim Ajami, head of Mubadala Ventures, the ventures arm of Mubadala Investment company. “We believe in Portworx’s mission to help enterprises run all their applications on Kubernetes by solving these important business requirements. We are looking forward to supporting Portworx for their next phase of growth.”

“Sapphire Ventures is increasing our investment in Portworx and co-leading their current financing since the company is the only game in town when it comes to providing cloud native data management for enterprises building container-based applications and using Kubernetes for orchestration,” said Jai Das, president and MD, Sapphire Ventures. “Portworx has shown the way for enterprises to build and deploy truly critical, data-rich applications with tremendous data management and scaling needs on containers using Kubernetes for orchestration. We are thrilled to expand our investment in Portworx as they continue on such an important mission.”

“Increasingly organizations are expanding their investments in containerized workloads to include mission-critical, data-rich applications,” said Kip Compton, senior VP, cloud solutions and platforms, Cisco Systems, Inc. “Portworx helps enterprises address the challenges presented by complex data management, security, performance and DR. We are investing in Portworx to enable its best-in-class solution to help our customers take advantage of new technologies in today’s multi-cloud environments in conjunction with Cisco’s overall multi-cloud portfolio.”

“Large enterprises like HPE’s own IT team are quickly adopting cloud-native technologies to deliver applications more quickly and at scale,” said Vishal Lall, chief strategy officer, HPE. “Our use of the Portworx Enterprise platform has allowed HPE to execute faster, reduce costs and increase quality of the data-rich applications our internal and external uses demand. Based on the value that we have experienced first hand, we are excited to invest in Portworx and support the company as it continues its impressive growth.”

“As the data authority for hybrid cloud, we are encouraged by innovation that helps customers harness the power of their data,” said Dave Wright, VP of technical strategy, NetApp. “Portworx’s impressive customer growth demonstrates the need for enterprises to leverage containers to transform their business and run data-rich applications on the Kubernetes platform. As an investor, we look forward to accompanying them on this journey.“

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