Simplyblock Raised $2.75 Million Seed Funding Round

Simplyblock Gmbh, the Berlin, Germany-based high performance cloud storage start-up, announced a $2.75 million seed funding round.

The round was led by 42CAP, the pan-European seed stage VC firm alongside Antler, the most active early-stage investor in Europe and Begin Capital, an international VC firm based in London, UK. Angel investors include Johan Svensson, the founder of Neo4j, the leading graph database company.

Simplyblock builds low-latency, high performance cloud storage. In this deep-tech industry traditionally dominated by cloud providers in USA and Israeli start-ups, it is the only start-up from Europe building in this space. The company is initially targeting database users of any kind (SQL, NoSQL, Vector or Graph) as first customers. With the first release, simplyblock will be available for AWS users worldwide.

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The German start-up rides on the latest technology advancements in SSD drives (NVMe technology) to provide predictable, low latency software thereby realizing the of the underlying hardware for users. Its tech, written mostly in C/C++ to leverage the capabilities of low-level Linux features, provides the ability to perform millions of IO/s with sub-millisecond latency. This means that software is up to 10x faster with a 50x better cost-to-performance ratio than legacy solutions in the enterprise as well as existing cloud storage.

Simplyblock’s technology is so important because data volumes on an annual basis are expected to rise 1,000% by 2030. As a result, the storage market is expected to be worth $250 billion, with more and more companies looking for fast, affordable and safe storage solutions.

There is also an important environmental impact to this technology. Data centres are responsible for more carbon emissions than the aviation industry and the International Energy Agency has called on data centres to halve their emissions by 2030. The low-latency, high performance solution will reduce the energy consumption required for cloud storage.

Whilst the product is already open for early-access customers running databases on AWS, the funding round will allow the company to expand its engineering team and take the product to availability later in the year.

Michael Schmidt, co-founder and CTO, comments: “As a CIO, I started to question the cost/performance ratio of enterprise storage systems in the light of the latest gen of storage hardware such as ultra-fast NVMe SSDs. It turned out that enterprise storage is quite an inert industry. And later on it became evident that fast cloud storage has at least the same potential for innovation and optimization. That is how we came up with an alternative, which is more flexible and better scalable, has better performance at much lower cost and reduced carbon emissions than today’s systems and services.”

Moritz Zimmermann, general partner, 42CAP, comments: “We were surprised how much room for optimisation there still is in storage – something that at first glance might seem like a commodity and highly optimised thing. The deep-tech nature of such technology makes it relatively sticky and innovation must be radical for the users to make the switch. The technology change in storage usually happens in 10-20 years cycles. Simplyblock is tackling the problem from a really innovative angle, breaking many of the existing paradigms in terms of how storage is accessed and consumed, and we believe that they can be a leader of the next technology wave in cloud storage.”

The founders of Simplyblock first met during an Antler residency in Berlin in 2022. The team brings technical experience following careers working for global tech businesses and unicorns.

Rob Pankow, co-founder and CEO, previously held senior roles at Rocket Internet start-ups and Delivery Hero. His background is scaling up businesses at different stages of growth. He leads sales and business development at Simplyblock.

Michael Schmidt, co-founder and CTO, has spent 20 years working in IT, holding CTO positions at large businesses as well as founding a number of businesses in the enterprise software space.

The founders have already built a small but experienced team of 10, which includes engineers that have worked for companies such as Nvidia, Mellanox, NetApp, Dell EMC, Instana and Timescale.

Joël van Dijk, partner, Begin Capital, comments: “The Simplyblock team is one of the strongest tech teams out there in the European cloud storage sector. There is momentum and a necessity created for optimizing storage. Data usage and storage will be growing exponentially and therefore there will be an expected price increase from the supply side. I am looking forward to working together with the team and to supporting them in this entrepreneurial journey.”

Alan Poensgen, partner, Antler, comments: “Rob and Michael really excited us as a founding team. They make a very compelling combination – one deeply technical founder with decades of experience who built this technology to solve real problems that he faced, and one operating founder with a proven track record scaling some of Europe’s most successful tech companies. They are uniquely placed to build this type of cloud storage solution – a first in Europe – and we are delighted to have supported them from day zero.”