OpenDrives Raises $20 Million in Series B, Total at $30 Million

OpenDrives LLC raised up to $20 million in series B funding.

The round was led by IAG Capital Partners bringing the company’s total capital raised to $30 million. 
 
The start-up will use the capital to grow the company, accelerating product development to introduce HPC, on-prem and hybrid cloud capabilities for global businesses in enterprise, M&E, pharmaceutical, and federal government agency markets. 
 
“Every innovation in our company has been powered by anticipating our customers’ needs, whether it was creating storage capacity to handle the first 6K film, bringing portable studios to live global broadcast or accelerating remote capabilities when Covid-19 forced customers into a work-from-home environment,” said David Buss, CEO. “Although our core DNA is in providing on-premise storage solutions, we’re backed by dynamic team expertise and investment partners who all share our bold vision for enabling the next gen of compute storage in delivering a more holistic solution to the industry.” 
 
Also announced is OpenDrives’ strategic investment in Ctrl IQ, Inc., set to debut this month, providing the core technology stack to enable scalable, secure and hybrid orchestration of workflows. OpenDrives will combine performance storage and compute with secure applications for a supported stack from the data center to the cloud to the edge. Ctrl IQ was founded by HPC veteran and recent Rocky Linux founder Gregory Kurtzer.  
 
“WW spending on storage architecture is set to be worth $78 billion in 2021,” said Joel Whitley, principal, IAG Capital Partners. “OpenDrives not only stands to capitalize on that, but with its powerful alliance with Ctrl IQ, is well-positioned to capture share in strengthening HPC and cloud computing sectors, which are expected to hit $10 billion and $832 respectively by 2025. We look forward to supporting OpenDrives in leading rapid technology advancements and continued commitment for meeting customer needs across storage, HPC and the cloud.” 
 
The capital will further amplify OpenDrives’ 2020 momentum, which included the release of 3 new product series, a customizable NAS hardware platform, supported by a re-designed Atlas software release. These milestones for the company enabled the delivery of scale-out capabilities without sacrificing scale-up performance. 
 
“We’ve continued to refine and optimize our hardware and software infrastructure, while always keeping our eye on the cloud, because our team develops solutions that prioritize customer needs over market trends,” said Sean Lee, chief strategy and product officer, OpenDrives. “Over the last 24 months, long before the pandemic, we saw ways to harness the power of the cloud to work for our clients without sacrificing performance or becoming cost-prohibitive. This represents a landmark in our ability to serve enterprise clients. Support from IAG Capital Partners will only accelerate this.”
 
OpenDrives has been answering customer needs since its founding in 2011. The company was created to answer the technical challenges director David Fincher (Mank, Mindhunter, The Social Network, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon TAttoo) faced in post-production. Those challenges centered around speed, latency, and scalability in creating his blockbuster films. The company has since powered high-fidelity films for every major Hollywood studio, handling some of the most demanding workflows in the M&E industry, from individual workstation-level to enterprise, with customizable NAS solutions.
 
“OpenDrives never rests on its laurels; in fact, the company continues to allow us to build on existing infrastructure and evolve in real-time, helping us tackle fundamental issues, such as latency or even the physical size of our drives,” said Bennett Cain, director, HBO Verification Lab. “We’ve been able to dramatically boost performance with OpenDrives serving as the backbone to the entire HBO Verification Lab stack for over 5 years and look forward to all-new, ever more performant innovations and solutions for the future to scale at the speed of our business.” 
 
In addition to product scale, and in anticipation for 2021 customer growth, OpenDrives is making strategic hires across engineering, marketing, customer support and sales. The company has also made notable C-suite hires over the past year, including: Buss as CEO, a former US Navy vice admiral and  Cubic Global Defense, Inc. president); Jonathan Adler as CMO (former global divisional CEO, Ogilvy) and Robert Adolph as VP of business development (former Technologist at Dell EMC, Inc.). 
 
OpenDrives is trusted by hundreds of businesses in M&E, streaming, live broadcast, e-sports, advertising, animation, security, military, healthcare and diagnostics, such as: HBO, Spotify, The Steadman Clinic, Riot Games, CBS Sports, FOX, Legendary Digital Networks, Sony Interactive Entertainment, LA Kings, South Park Studios, Vox, Deutsch.