Pliops Closes $65 Million Funding Round

Pliops Ltd. closed a $65 million oversubscribed funding round, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT).

All current investors, including State of Mind Ventures (SOMV), Viola Ventures, Intel Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Expon Capital, Western Digital Corp., Xilinx, and Sweetwood Capital participated, with NVIDIA increasing its share.

This news positions the start-up to deliver game-changing value for enterprise and cloud customers.

The investment will be used to bring the new levels of scale, speed and cost effectiveness promised by firm’s storage processor to more customers in more ways. A hardware-enabled storage engine deployed in a PCIe card form factor or as a cloud service, the storage processor unlocks the potential of SSD storage by exponentially improving cost, performance and endurance. Through its storage processor, the company substantially accelerates the processing of data-intensive applications in data centers.

“Pliops is effectively reinventing the approach to one of the most critical, data-intensive challenges in a very large, expanding market,” said KDT MD Eli Groner. “The Pliops technology has broad applicability to not only today’s workloads, but the emerging workloads of tomorrow.”

On a mission to change the way data and storage are managed in the data center, the company plans to scale its technology into new use cases, expand its product line, and double the size of the company by the end of 2021. It has expanded its executive team and is ramping up its resources as it moves into its next stage: to deliver broad availability of its storage processor and to expand value for their long list of existing customers.

Of key importance to Plipos is enabling more customers by delivering their solution in multiple forms. Whether on premises, in the cloud, integrated with customer products, or built into an ASIC, the firm is engaged with leaders in the cloud service provider and broader enterprise market segments seeking to accelerate a range of data-intensive workloads.

“Pliops technology accelerates the fastest growing workloads that are driving demand for increased compute and storage performance in data centers,” noted Nimrod Gindi, SVP of investments, NVIDIA. “Combining NVIDIA data center GPU and DPU product lines with Pliops’ storage processor for accelerated cloud and ML solutions will provide exceptional performance and efficiency for our customers.”

While issues like efficient data structures and dynamic capacity management have been studied for years, Pliops’ novel combined hardware and software approach has motivated leaders in data store and processing to invest in the company. Likewise, many of the largest cloud data center providers and users, as well as storage innovators like Percona, SAKURA Internet and Intel, have publicly recognized the potential impact of Pliops’ innovations – and are collaborating as customers and partners.

“KDT is focused on making big bets on disruptive technology with huge market potential – which aligns perfectly with what we are doing at Plios,” noted Uri Beitler, founder and CEO. “With storage – and the computational requirements for processing that data – growing at an exponential rate, status quo approaches fall short. Our solution takes a new approach that enables unprecedented scalability in data centers. Additionally, to have a partner as important as NVIDIA increase their investment in Plios is a huge vote of confidence. We are committed to growing our technology to its maximum potential, and look forward to strategic, long-term partnerships with our investors and customers.”