Lightbits Continues Growth, Complete Data Platform Innovation for Any Cloud

Lightbits Labs Ltd. ended 2022 by increasing its average deal size and doubling its deal pipeline and install base.

The company’s growth is fueled by enterprise organizations shifting to a cloud-first strategy, which according to Fortune Business Insights is projected to grow from $480B in 2022 to $1.7T by 2029, at a CAGR of 19.9%.¹

Despite the challenging economic climate, the organization has increased its average deal size by 1.7x and grown its install base by 2.2x Y/Y for 2022. It also achieved a 2.2x increase in pipeline growth signaling that the company is well-positioned for continued success as enterprise organizations seek to move their SAN-based workloads to the cloud. In addition to these successes, customer confidence is strong, with existing customers re-purchases 2.6x higher than the previous purchase.

The company’s success is derived from the data platform that fills a critical gap in cloud storage features and capabilities. The combination of software-defined, disaggregated, and clustered NVMe/TCP architecture with flash management and built-in enterprise data services satisfy the growing demand for an efficient, simple, and agile data platform that enables cloud transformation. The firm is easy to consume on any cloud and is compatible with VMware, Kubernetes, and OpenStack orchestration environments.

Zenlayer, an emerging CloudEdge provider, implemented Lightbits last year for its VM and container-based edge cloud, solving their need for a low latency, multi-tenant data platform with the flexibility to adapt to their changing infrastructure architecture.

“Lightbits is thriving amidst a challenging economic climate because we satisfy the need we are hearing from customers who want to migrate their SAN-based critical workloads to the cloud, but don‘t want to comprise on application performance,” said Eran Kirzner, co-founder and CEO, Lightbits. “We offer high-performance, consistent low latency, and predictable low cost that customers can’t get with native cloud solutions. If enterprise organizations want a blazingly fast, complete data platform for their database and analytics workloads that spans public and private clouds they come to Lightbits.“

Funding growth
There have been several investments made in the company during 2022 bringing its total funds raised since its founding in 2016 to more than $110 million, including a mid-year investment of $42 million in growth capital in a funding round led by Atreides Management LP.

Product innovation
A golden thread running through 2022 for the vendor was its ongoing product innovation reflected by several tech organizations making its solution available on their marketplaces:

• In June 2022, it was released on AWS Marketplace to deliver cloud-native, NVMe-powered solutions that enhance AWS customers’ operational efficiency and performance.
• In April 2022, the Lightbits Cloud Data Platform was made available on VMware Marketplace, a one-stop shop for VMware-validated and certified ecosystem solutions.
• In March 2022, support for Lightbits was included as part of OpenStack Yoga. The company is also committed to supporting open cloud environments by ensuring interoperability and availability through all OpenStack future releases.

Key appointments
Throughout the year, it made several strategic appointments:

• Dr. Yoav Intrator was named to the Lightbits advisory board. He is a sought-after global executive with extensive expertise in financial services, hightech, telco, Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud technologies, AI, and ML.
• Charla Bunton-Johnson as its new VP of global alliances and channels. Bunton-Johnson is focused on driving growth velocity through the channel, forming and strengthening alliances that better enable partner success while also managing the Lightbits GoPurple global program.
• Thomas A. DeLorenzo as its VP sales US East. He is focused on helping drive the organization’s strategy to deliver software-defined NVMe/TCP storage solutions to enterprise customers.
• Rex Manseau as its VP sales for North America. He is responsible for all Americas sales and works closely with business and marketing teams to help shape the strategy and product roadmap.

Celebrating awards
The company received several significant industry awards in 2022:

• TechTarget names the firm One of the Best Enterprise Cloud Storage Products of 2022
• CRN named it to its 2022 Emerging Vendors list in the Storage category.
• A first-time listing for the GoPurple program in the CRN 2022 Partner Program Guide, the list of the most notable partner programs from technology vendors.
• It was selected as the winner of the Data Storage Innovation of the Year award in the third annual Data Breakthrough Awards.
• It was named a winner in the 2022 BIG Innovation Awards.

Patents
In 2022, the company received 4 patents, with more pending, reinforcing its commitment to disrupting the market with innovative and relevant cloud solutions:

• Patent 11,513,729 for distributed write buffer for storage systems.
• Patent 11,467,730 for system and method for managing storage on non-volatile memory media.
• Patent 11,385,798 for method and system for application-aware management of write operations on non-volatile storage.
• Patent 11,256,431 for a storage system having a field programmable gate array.

¹ Fortune Business Insights, Cloud Computing Market.