Hammerspace Raises $56.7 Million in First Institutional Funding
Enterprises seeking solutions to fuel collaboration, automation, analytics, AI and ML to enter next data cycle
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on July 19, 2023 at 2:02 pmHammerspace Inc. announced $56.7 million in funding in its first round of institutional investment.
It launched in 2018 with the vision of making all enterprise data globally accessible, useful and indispensable, sparking the next level of business innovations. The funding round, led by Prosperity7 Ventures, also includes Pier 88 Ventures, ARK Invest, and others.
Data has been widely considered to be among the world’s most valuable resources for some time. However, only 10% of enterprise data (structured data) can be easily processed and analyzed for the benefit of the business. The remaining 90% of data is unstructured, and much more difficult to use due to its sheer volume and the complexity of moving it from the storage silo where it was originally created to where it can be easily accessed and used. The fact that most data is not organized in a pre-defined manner makes it difficult for enterprises to really understand what they have, but more importantly, to find and extract the value held within their digital assets.
Hammerspace’s Data Orchestration System makes unstructured data a global resource, so teams can access, activate and monetize their data without interrupting user access. It enables organizations to dynamically orchestrate their data across multiple vendors and operators, without creating unnecessary data silos.
“Hammerspace is uniquely positioned to accelerate the Next Data Cycle for enterprises through unstructured data orchestration,” said David Flynn, CEO. “The last data cycle focused on structured data rooted in business intelligence, but this data cycle, driven by compute, orchestration and applications, leverages unstructured data to drive product innovation and business opportunity with AI, ML and analytics. Hammerspace’s new funding will enable the company to help more customers unlock the value in unstructured data, create new revenue streams and drive operational efficiency.”
With the rise of AI and ML technologies, the enterprises and public sector organizations that orchestrate these large amounts of unstructured data to algorithms will transform their businesses and ultimately win the race to reach the Next Data Cycle. AI has rapidly made its way up the list of priorities for enterprises across all industries and geographies, and it’s not limited to just large enterprises: many mid-sized companies have made AI an essential part of their near- and long-term digital transformation efforts.
“It’s now axiomatic that data is powering the modern economy, and the demand for more data will only increase exponentially. Driven by AI advancements, robust tools now exist to analyze data and tease out actionable insights. However, file storage infrastructure has not kept pace with these advancements,” said Jonathan Tower, MD, Prosperity7 Ventures. “Hammerspace’s breakthrough technology enables businesses to efficiently access unstructured data, moving us closer to what the cloud was always intended to be – unified, seamless access to data, irrespective of geography, without silos, unacceptable latency or infrastructure limitations. Our investment in Hammerspace maps back to our commitment to supporting entrepreneurs who are developing next-gen technologies with the potential to create category-defining companies with global reach and scale.”
“The industry has long been focused on the complexity of storing and accessing massive quantities of unstructured data,” said senior strategist Randy Kerns, Futurum Group. “With the technologies of today and requirements for data, the urgent need in the latest data cycle is the orchestration of a data pipeline of unstructured data to analytics for AI and ML applications, enabling speed and agility for enterprises.”
Unstructured data like scientific instruments, machine-generated data, video, images, audio files and office documents are creating the Next Data Cycle, defining how businesses create opportunities and activate innovations. AI, scientific discovery, ML, extended reality, autonomy and corporate video are just some of the industries driving the creation and volume of unstructured data. IDC estimates that upwards of 90% of business information is likely to be formed of unstructured data by 2025.
The funding will support technology expansion and customer service, allowing Hammerspace to expand its team of skilled professionals dedicated to helping customers utilize unstructured data. An expanded firm’s team will support more customers with the full capability and transparency to activate, access and monetize their unstructured data.
While this first round of institutional funding, company’s growth trajectory mirrors that of a relatively mature company. Working with existing customers like Blue Origin, The National Science Foundation and Royal Caribbean Group, Hammerspace is well-positioned to lead the unstructured data orchestration industry.
“The information of our world increasingly is decentralized. Companies, now more than ever, need to access and move unstructured data out of silos and across platforms, making it more useful and valuable,” said Cathie Wood, founder, CEO, and CIO, ARK Invest. “Our mission is to capitalize on technological convergence across markets and industries that is changing the way the world works. Hammerspace aligns with this mission, unlocking new innovations across the enterprise.”
“Our target investments include established companies with effectual businesses that solve real pain points for businesses,” said Mitch McCullough, partner, Pier 88 Ventures. “Hammerspace’s technology is being utilized as a strategic business differentiator for many of the world’s largest organizations to derive data-driven insights, accelerate product development and create new business initiatives.”
“Hammerspace’s unique, hardware-agnostic approach allowing corporations to manage ever-increasing data through the Global Data Environment sets it apart in the industry,” said Eric Howe, Sky Family Office. “We are incredibly fortunate and happy to have been able to support Hammerspace over the past few years and through this capital raise, as it has continuously upgraded its offering and increased awareness of its capabilities, and we look forward to continuing our support as David Flynn and the team fulfill their potential of transforming how corporations create and manage their data.”
Learn More
Video: Why Hammerspace
Overview of the Key Components and Performance Metrics of Hammerspace Software
Comments
This is great news for Hammerspace and market observers expect this for quite some time as sales took off and several executives were recruited. In 2022, the business grew 300% and the team by 50%. With this new cash ingested within the company, clearly a new era starts and things should accelerate as we speak.
The company under this name was founded in 2018 but the real technology initiative was started before with Primary Data in 2013 that acquired Tonian Systems at that time. Tonian Systems, founded in 2010, was an Israeli company who developed an independent pNFS pure software implementation. The time line below illustrates this evolution. David Flynn understood pretty early, like a few others, that a global data access, let’s say file, will be a key element for enterprises in their quest to master data wherever it resides exposed with open access protocols or APIs.
With the explosion of unstructured data in various places, the need to access them without any movements, sometimes impossible, became a must. Some people associate this difficulty with the notion of data gravity that explains the potential pain to group or consolidate data. But why physically move data when you can access it globally in place with the right routing layer fueled by the right metadata engine. So the idea to offer a global access to various data units, places, servers… became an obvious consideration but not at all an easy task to solve.
To put things in context, we had in the past some offerings playing in the Network File Management or Network File Virtualization landscape all playing locally such Attune, coming from Z-force and later asset swallowed by F5 Networks in 2009, Acopia Networks also acquired by F5 in 2007, AutoVirt who collapsed, NeoPath acquired by Cisco in 2007, Rainfinity acquired by EMC in 2005 or NuView acquired by Brocade in 2006 for StorageX. Brocade has even tried to develop a new iteration named File Management Engine. Now StorageX is promoted, developed and supported today by Data Dynamics. We called that wave the File Area Network (FAN) but was it too early or not really adequate, lots of these companies suffered but triggered something and some exist today of course, doing pretty well as well. We also had solutions around WAFS, WAN optimization and SD-WAN, even today, that addresses these global access needs. But an even more unified layer is needed and Hammerspace understood this pretty early. We refer often to the U3 model for Universal, Unified and Ubiquitous, and the start-up represents a good example of such concept.
We also see Cloud File Storage and Unstructured Data Management as a converging realm with players like Arcitecta, CTera, Data Dynamics, Komprise, Nasuni, Nodeum, Panzura, PoINT, Spectra Logic, StrongLink, Tiger Technology or XenData to name a few.
And of course Hammerspace belongs to these various categories as their solution could be assimilate to a chameleon, able to deliver distinct services on different environments but also unify the data access, fueled by advanced policies behind, and enrich the user experience.
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With all these players, the battle is clearly on, the need is obvious so we’ll see more M&As in the domain, investments, users’ adoption and newcomers. Good, the market is really hot and active in that landscape.
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