600% Revenue Growth From 2018 to 2019 for WekaIO

WekaIO, Inc. (Weka) closed its 2019 fiscal year with record velocity in revenue.

The company grew revenue by 600% compared to 2018 with growth fueled by increasing adoption of NVMe-native storage systems to enable I/O-intensive applications in AI, life sciences, and financial analysis.

This announcement comes in the wake of last year’s $31.7 million series C funding round and the addition of hires in strategic positions such as CFO, and head of AI and strategic alliances.

“We are solving big problems for our customers and filling a gap in technology solutions for our partners, and thus Weka’s momentum is like a bullet. Our tremendous growth last year was fueled by several multi-million dollar deals for large infrastructure modernization projects, and I am honored that these organizations see the value of Weka to enable their datacenter transformation. Our channel-first strategy focuses on vertical markets where we see massive adoption by corporations, and where legacy storage systems are failing to offer competitive advantages in ML, FSI analytics, and precision medicine,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO. “We are the only tier-1, enterprise-grade storage solution capable of delivering epic performance at any scale on premises and on the public cloud, and we will continue to fuel our momentum by hiring for key positions and identifying strategic partnerships.”

Weka is 100% channel-focused, the WekaIO Innovation Network (WIN), a partner program launched last year, enables partners to grow their top line by generating recurring revenue for performance intensive use cases, as well as expand their practices and competencies. WIN grew to 67 partners in 2019, a 120% growth rate. In addition, the company announced technology innovations with partners such as Supermicro, Dell EMC, HPE, and NVIDIA.

“There is only one company that delivers unmatched performance at scale for the enterprise, enabling today’s IO-intensive applications, and that’s Weka,” said Kevin Mullin, VP of business development, A-TRAC Computer Sales & Services Corp., a WIN Leader partner. “Not only does it deliver great performance, but it offers all the mandatory features common in enterprise storage solutions such as encryption, user authentication, backup and DR, Windows support, and cloud-bursting.”

The Weka File System (WekaFS) was architected to accelerate I/O to CPU and GPU-enabled compute clusters whether the data resides on-premises or in the public cloud, or a hybrid of both. It empowers customers to realize more value out of their compute resources providing an enterprise grade solution with the all the features found in legacy appliances, while future-proofing their IT investments with security and cloud integration.

Customers ranging from Fortune 100 to start-ups in AI such as Genomics England, TGEN, TuSimple, Baylor University, Innoviz, Mellanox, Tre Altamira, and Untold Studios are using Weka storage software in private datacenters or in the public cloud to accelerate time to results for their high-performance applications.

“The Genomics England cluster required a new solution to allow scaling of the company’s DNA data bank in line with the anticipated 5-year growth. Already at 25PB, our legacy storage system had already reached its limit and performance had deteriorated,” said David Ardley, director of technology, Genomics England. “We needed a modern storage solution that could scale to hundreds of petabytes while maintaining performance scaling, and it had to be simple to manage at that scale. With its clever combination of flash for performance and object store for scale, Weka has proven to be a great solution.”

Company highlights from 2019:
• 600% growth in revenue
• 500% growth in customers with AI, ML, and HPC use cases
• 300% growth in AWS storage, topping 100PB in 2019
• 120% growth in partners with AI, ML, and HPC competency
• Platform announcements with OEM partners
• Awards: AI Excellence Award, CIOReview’s 100 Most Promising Tech start-ups, CRN Women of the Channel, AI Breakthrough Award, HPE Momentum Technology Partner of the Year, CRN Emerging Datacenter Vendor, and CRN Tech Innovator Award – Data Center Infrastructure
• Industry benchmark performance records: IO-500, SPEC SFS, and STAC-M3

Weka is a fast file system, beating the largest HPCs to gain the first-place ranking in the IO-500 Challenge, announced at Supercomputing 2019, in Denver, CO. It compares storage systems that work in tandem with the largest HPCs. WekaFS set a record with a 51% better performance score than the prior record set at International Supercomputing Conference 2019, Frankfurt, Germany.

WekaIO has been awarded 16 patents, with more than 40 patents pending.