Virident Closed New Round of Funding

Virident Systems, Inc. has closed a new round of funding led by Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The Series B round was co-led by another new investor, Globespan Capital Partners, together with participation from existing investors including Artiman Ventures who see continued value in Virident’s vision for solid-state storage solutions in the enterprise datacenter. The funding will be used to accelerate Virident’s solid-state storage solutions and scale to address this growing market demand.

tachIOn delivers an advantage to customers across several requirements: sustained performance (2-10x for random access patterns); rated usable capacity without the need to reserve additional memory to cater to heavy write workloads; low power; compact form factor; field upgradability; multi-year durability; and lower total cost of ownership.

"This is an exciting time at Virident. Since our product launch in June this year, we have seen a sharp ramp-up in customers who love the capacity and sustained performance delivered by our tachIOn solution," said Kumar Ganapathy, CEO of Virident. "This funding round by top VCs is further proof of our capability to accelerate growth, and will allow Virident to continue to deliver innovative Flash-based storage solutions that address the challenges of performance, reliability, and scaling."

tachIOn is also the first product to bring together the hardware and software technologies for a systematic build-out of server-side Tier-0 storage across an entire data center. Dubbed the Virident GreenCloud Storage Software, this capability will be released in phases to enable large-scale deployment of SSDs, which until now has been hampered by capacity fragmentation and inconsistent availability of SSD resources to applications that need them.

"Solid-state storage is the fastest growing segment of the storage market. Virident is positioned as the leader in the PCIe-based Flash enterprise segment," said Mike Goguen, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "Virident’s Flash expertise has created a disruptive and unique solution to the rapidly growing data-intensive enterprise-class application workloads such as rich media, web2.0, data analytics, and social media. Virident’s tachIOn is the first solution that delivers on the growing requirement for Tier-0 storage solutions: fast storage that occupies the space between servers and traditional hard-drive storage solutions on the server-side and/or the storage-side."

Virident Systems has built expertise in flash and related non-volatile memory technologies and assembled a team focused on the use of such technologies by modern data-intensive applications.

"Virident not only has unique and disruptive technology, but they also have a world-class management team with a compelling vision for making Flash storage both viable and affordable for the enterprise-class customer," said Ullas Naik, managing director, Globespan Capital Partners. "Since the introduction of tachIOn, Virident has garnered an impressive and growing list of enterprise customers. Their vision for enterprise solutions that deliver the highest sustained performance without compromising on enterprise reliability is evidenced by their recent announcements of 800GB storage capacity, twice that of competing products, in a low profile packaging."