IO Turbine Secures $7.75 Million in Funding

IO Turbine, Inc., an early-stage company preparing to introduce a software solution to address I/O bottleneck issues by using Flash technology directly in VMware server environments, announced that it has secured $7.75 million in funding led by Silicon Valley VC Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as Merus Capital and angel investors.

As a software-only solution IO Turbine will allow users to transparently identify the highest priority data and utilize Flash to deliver IOPS directly to all designated virtual machines that require high performance.

IO Turbine was founded by an executive team with decades of experience in the high tech industry at companies such as EMC, NetApp, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. Silicon Valley veterans Rich Boberg and Vikram Joshi lead the team.

Rich Boberg, who serves as IO Turbine’s CEO, is an experienced executive in high tech startups and helped establish companies, including NetApp. Boberg was the sixth employee at NetApp, where he held executive positions in marketing, corporate development and engineering. Prior to starting IO Turbine, Boberg was advising starups on networked storage, as well as co-founding Innovation Quest, a non-profit organization at Cal Poly to foster the entrepreneurial success of its students.

Vikram Joshi is the company’s CTO, with a background in operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, databases, storage, media and computer graphics. He worked at Oracle on database performance and key technology that now forms the foundation of the Exadata product. At Sun, he worked on machine bring-ups, parallelized the Solaris virtual memory system to demonstrate linear scalability, and worked on the Spring microkernel (SunLabs). He also founded PixBlitz Studios to build virtual advertising technology for broadcasters and sports leagues and worked on Video on Demand at SGI.

"A new company must bring disruptive technology, a compelling value proposition and a world class team to the table to be considered a good candidate for investment. IO Turbine has all three," said John Vrionis, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners. "We see IO Turbine as addressing a critical issue with an extremely innovative technology and we are pleased to be a part of what we know will be a successful business."

Other seasoned executives at IO Turbine include the company’s Executive Vice President of Engineering Sunil Joshi, whose experience covers a range of technologies including computer system architecture, large-scale private clouds, system and application software for enterprise environments, VLSI design, high-availability systems and networking. Prior to joining IO Turbine, he was a Senior Vice President at Sun Microsystems and held technical management positions at Advanced Micro Devices.

Bruce Clarke is IO Turbine’s Vice President of Technical Marketing and Support. A computer industry veteran with entrepreneurial experience, Clarke’s three-decade career also includes working with industry leaders such as EMC/Data Domain, where he was Director of Technical Marketing; NetApp and Sun Microsystems, among others.

Jay Phillips is Vice President of Sales, having most recently served as Regional Director at Dell, leading SaaS/Cloud efforts. Phillips came to Dell through EqualLogic, one of Dell s most successful acquisitions, where he was regional Vice President of Sales, and has further sales experience with NetApp, Boston Scientific and PepsiCo.

"We are looking forward to officially introducing our game-changing solution to solve the biggest problem in virtualized computing I/O performance. Our goal is to empower organizations to virtualize more, faster," said Boberg. "We have assembled an unbeatable team of veterans from industry leaders like EMC, NetApp, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and VMware and I am proud to be part of this team and all the efforts made by them thus far."