$80 Million Growth Investment for Ctera from PSG Equity

CTERA Networks Ltd., provider in hybrid cloud data management, raised $80 million in primary and secondary funding from PSG Equity, a leading growth equity firm focused on software and technology-enabled services companies.

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As part of the transaction, Ronen Nir, MD, PSG, has joined CTERA’s board of directors alongside existing shareholders Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Red Dot Capital Partners.

The company is at the core of hybrid cloud initiatives at some of the world’s largest banks, healthcare organizations, global media groups, and government agencies, in deployments that scale to 100s of petabytes.

Unstructured data is a critical component of any enterprise storage strategy, representing about 80% of organizational data distributed across branch offices, endpoints, on-premises, and cloud data centers. Within this space, hybrid cloud file storage is one of the fastest-growing segments.

According to Gartner, “By 2027, 60% of I&O leaders will implement hybrid cloud file deployments, up from 20% in early 2023.” ⁽¹⁾

The proliferation of AI technology helps make unstructured data management more crucial than ever before, as data access is needed not only for users and applications but also for AI workflows. The new enterprise AI platforms depend on timely access to corporate data for training models and for augmented data retrieval to ensure relevance and accuracy.

“We believe CTERA is setting the standard for the modern hybrid data platform, with military-certified security and unparalleled performance,” said Liran Eshel, founder and COB. “The strategic partnership with PSG will enable us to further drive our expansion while delivering top service to our customers, and implement our vision for AI data services.”

“This investment is evidence of CTERA’s robust business model and the opportunity it represents,” said Nir. “We are excited to partner with CTERA as they embark on capturing, what we believe will be an inflection point in the hybrid cloud data market, leveraging both organic and inorganic opportunities to strengthen CTERA’s position and deliver even greater value to its customers.”

⁽¹⁾ Source: Gartner, Top Trends in Enterprise Data Storage 2023, By Chandra Mukhyala, Julia Palmer, Jeff Vogel, 29 June 2023.

Comments

This is a major milestone for the company with a restructure of the capital and new cash. It confirms that the team has made some significant impacts on the market illustrated by the last Coldago 2023 Map for File Storage in the cloud file storage category.

Beyond the various technology developed and features offered over the last few quarters like file + S3 access, ransomware prevention and WORM locking or AI integration, the firm has clearly positioned the solution as an enterprise data platform to leverage multiple use cases they already support and deliver pretty well. It also is seen by the partner development and adoption level. It will be interesting to see the next corporate and product iterations.