Liqid Raises $100 Million in Series C

Liqid, Inc. announced $100 million in series C funding.

The funding was co-led by Lightrock and affiliates of DH Capital, with participation from current investors Panorama Point Partners and Iron Gate Capital.

The start-up will use the funding to scale and meet growing global demand for its its Matrix composable software and solutions. In 2021, the company more than doubled its workforce, surpassed 100 customers, and executed 1,034% revenue growth from 2017 to 2021 (1).

Customers and partners include the US Department of Defense, Dell Technologies, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Intel Corporation.

Liqid’s composable infrastructure software platform – Liqid Matrix – unlocks cloud-like speed, and flexibility, and higher efficiency from data center infrastructure. Users can configure, deploy, and scale physical bare-metal servers ins, then reallocate valuable accelerator, storage, and other resources via software as needs evolve. Firm’s dynamic, multi-fabric platform unlocks new levels of speed, flexibility, and resource efficiency, with massive sustainability benefits for a variety of industry verticals.

Traditional data center architectures are rigidly configured, and can no longer accommodate the demands of modern AI-centric workloads. These shortcomings lead to capital and operational inefficiencies and associated increases in carbon emissions. Liqid enables modern, fully dynamic infrastructure that raises utilization rates and reduces power and cooling requirements, delivering the industry’s most efficient and sustainable data center architecture. The result is unprecedented architectural flexibility, efficiency, and time-to-results for AI, HPC, cloud computing, edge computing, and other data centric applications driving global innovation and economic expansion.

The number of global data centers has increased from 500,000 in 2012 to more than 8 million in 2021 (2). Current growth trajectories suggest that data centers will consume as much as 20% of global energy by 2025 (3), with the typical data center using about 3-5 million gallons of water per day – the same amount as a city of 30,000-50,000 people (4). Liqid solutions provide 2-3x improvements in data center utilization rates compared to traditional static architectures (5), reducing energy consumption and saving millions of gallons of water and tons of global CO² emissions per year.

The company will use the funding to expand internationally and grow its sales force to capitalize on the growing composable software market, enhance its support function, increase awareness and provide global marketing support for additional OEM and channel partners, and strengthen the company’s operations team to scale with opportunities across all business functions. It will also utilize the funding to accelerate the company’s software development roadmap and maintain the company’s leadership position.

“As IT professionals strive to maximize efficiency in next-gen computing while simultaneously enhancing system performance, Liqid software enables enterprises and data center operators to do more with less,” said Marty Friedman, partner and MD, DH Capital. “Liqid’s software and solutions support ongoing growth and productive innovation for public and private organizations alike, while also reducing waste and inefficiency.”

“With powerful market-leading software, a commanding leadership position in the space, and partnerships with the industry’s top data center solutions providers, Liqid is a clear leader in rethinking sustainable data center architecture. We look forward to supporting the company during this exciting period of expansion as it builds upon its well-established success,” said Ashish Puri, growth investor, Lightrock.

“We have always been impressed by Liqid’s ability to provide unmatched performance and flexibility for the most demanding computational workloads,” said Stephen George, founder of Panorama Point and its successor firm InterAlpen Partners. “Perhaps equally important are the significant efficiencies offered by Liqid for stakeholders who are increasingly concerned with the broader ecological footprint of their data centers. By enabling performance efficiencies that can reduce energy and water usage by 50% or more in some use cases, Liqid is delivering significant benefits to business productivity and the planet.“

“Liqid is excited to announce this funding to drive extended hypergrowth as software-defined infrastructure solutions like ours quickly become mainstream alongside the expansion of next-gen workloads like AI,” said Sumit Puri, CEO and co-founder, Liqid. “As the clear leader in composable software solutions we are committed to collaborating with other industry leaders to provide the most flexible, efficient, and valuable software-defined architecture for organizations developing advanced AI, HPC, cloud, and edge compute systems deployed to solve the world’s most difficult problems.”

Liqid ranks among the Deloitte Fast 500‘s fastest growing companies and has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor in the cloud infrastructure category. Founders were awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, and the company has been recognized by CRN, the AI Breakthrough Awards, Built in Colorado, The Tech Tribune, and other providers of industry recognitions.

(1) Source: Deloitte US, 2021 Fast 500 Rankings November 2021
(2) Source: Data Center Knowledge, The Data Center Dilemma: Is Our Data Destroying the Environment, April 2019
(3) Source: World Economic Forum, By 2025 the IT industry could use 20% of all electricity produced. How can we make it sustainable?, June 2021
(4) Source: NBC News, Drought-stricken communities push back vs. data centers, June 2021
(5) Source: Evaluator Group, Technical Insight Report: How Composable Infrastructure Addresses IT’s Problem of Space and Time, November 2020