Extended Series B Funding of $15.5 Million for Alluxio

Alluxio, Inc. extended its series B financing to $15.5 million, co-led by new investor Volcanics Ventures and existing investor a16z, with participation from technology entrepreneurs Isilon founder Sujal Patel and YY founding CTO Tony Zhao, and existing investor Seven Seas Partners.

This brings the total amount of funding raised to date to $23 million.

“Alluxio represents an extraordinary opportunity for strong growth in the data-driven hybrid and multicloud market. We are excited to partner with Alluxio and see the progress the company has made by establishing strategic partnerships with mega-cloud and compute-focused vendors and accelerating Alluxio’s momentum with enterprise and community adoption around the globe,” said Suyang Zhang, founding partner, Volcanics Ventures. “With Alluxio’s hybrid cloud Data Orchestration Platform fully in place and Haoyuan’s leadership, the company is well positioned to continue the strong growth of the business.“

During the past year, Alluxio advanced its technological leadership and commitment to open source with two releases of its Data Orchestration Platform powering multi-cloud analytics and AI; won industry awards and accolades; unveiled advanced cloud service integrations on Amazon AWS and Google Cloud; and took a role in advancing community-driven open source, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.

“Alluxio’s vision and data orchestration technology is at the intersection of cloud, AI and data,” said Haoyuan (H.Y.), Li, founder and CEO. “Customers across telecommunications, Internet, retail and ecommerce, and financial services are working with us and identifying innovative use cases for leveraging data across frameworks, clouds and storage. We view our strong customer and partner relationships as validating our approach and innovation that enables analytics and AI in hybrid cloud and multi cloud environments.”

Customer Expansion and Customer Wins
The start-up continues to attract new customers and expand existing customer deployments around the globe. In the last 6 months, tens of new production deployments have been added including Alibaba, EA, Nielsen, Roblox, Ryte, Tencent, VIPShop, Walmart, Walkme and WeRide.

“With the growing challenge of making data available to analysts and applications in a timely manner, the need for effective data orchestration is a key business requirement,” said Wensheng Wang, architect, JD.com. “Working with Alluxio has helped us to improve time to insights while keeping control over the cost of our data infrastructure. The use of Alluxio is now a key part of our data architecture and enabling technology for new data applications.”

Technology Innovations for Data Orchestration Platform
• Shipped the release of its Data Orchestration Platform since its founding with innovations for data engineers managing and deploying analytical and AI workloads in the cloud, particularly for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Shipped Structured Data Service (SDS) featuring a data Catalog Service and Transformation Service, two new architectural components of its Data Orchestration Platform. Data engineers, architects and developers can now spend less resources storing data and more time delivering data to analytical compute engines.
• Announced the availability of cloud offerings and integrations with the Data Orchestration Platform, including making available cloud formation templates and tighter integration with AWS EMR service.
• New offering on Google Cloud including an integration with Google Cloud Data Proc allowing users to bring up Alluxio within the Google Dataproc cluster with a single command.
 
Editorial and readership awards, including:
• Database Trends and Applications Trend-Setting Products in Data Management and Analysis for 2020 list
• Database Trends and Applications Big Data 50 – Companies Driving Innovation in 2019 list featured in its Big Data Quarterly
• InsideBIGDATA IMPACT 50 List for Q3 and Q4 2019
• Pagan Research’s list of The Most Promising Big Data Start-Ups in the World
• Solutions Review  The Top 13 Free Open Source Storage Solutions list
• CRN Top 10 Big Data Start-Ups of 2019 (so far) list
• CRN Top 10 Coolest Enterprise Cloud Services of 2019 list (so far)
• CRN Hot Big Data Companies to Watch in 2020 list

Expanding Partner Ecosystem
• The firm strengthened its partnerships with Amazon AWS and Google Cloud, by making its Data Orchestration Platform available in the Amazon AWS Marketplace, advancing to the Select Technology Partner status and joining the Google Cloud Partner Program as a technology partner, giving AWS and Google Cloud customers the ability to accelerate analytical workloads and orchestrate data across clouds. 
• Formed OEM partnership with Starburst Data, the Presto company, to offer a bundled solution that provides its users with performance and multi-cloud capabilities for interactive analytic workloads. Users can now transform their legacy data warehouse approach to a modern cloud approach, with a disaggregated compute and storage stack built on Presto, Alluxio and any file or object storage.
• Hosted Inaugural Data Orchestration Summit, bringing together practitioners and leaders at the intersection of cloud, AI, and data.
• Joined Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation to help scale and accelerate the popular distributed SQL query engine Presto. 
 
Read also:
Alluxio Closed $8.5 Million in Series B
Veritas founder and former CEO Mark Leslie joined investment round.
January, 18, 2019 | Press Release