$23 Million Funding for Pivot3

Pivot3, Inc., provider of unified storage and compute appliances, announced the closing of a $23 million round of new equity financing, which will principally be used to fund expansion of its product development, sales and marketing activities.

Richard Bravman, Pivot3 CEO, commented: "I am very pleased that we have reached this important milestone. Coming at a time when our business has developed significant momentum through marketplace wins, it will allow us to invest in the further build-out of our innovation and go-to-market growth engines. Combined with recent moves to strengthen our team, it puts us in a great position to better serve our existing customers, penetrate new markets, deepen our partnerships and expand operations in both our rapidly growing core video surveillance and emerging IT businesses. We will accelerate the global roll-out of our innovative VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure initiative and introduce new solid state solutions and partner programs to the video surveillance market."

The round was led by Samsung Ventures Investment Corp., and participated in by all existing Pivot3 investors: Focus Ventures, InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial, Northleaf Capital Partners and Silver Creek Ventures.

In a related development, Pivot3 has set the foundation for executing a commercial partnership with Samsung Techwin Co, Ltd. a technology manufacturer and systems integrator.

Brian Kang, managing director of Samsung Ventures America added: "We chose to invest in Pivot3 because we see them as a leading player in a large and rapidly growing space of strategic importance to our business. The commercial partnership with our Techwin affiliate yields an important second dimension of mutual opportunity for the companies."

Techwin is a provider of security solutions, a sector that leverages Pivot3’s position and focus in converged compute / storage solutions for video surveillance.

Pivot3’s Chairman, Ron Nash, partner at InterWest, concluded: "Pivot3 is in a great position to leverage this investment into robust future growth and business success. It has strong leadership, a focused strategy, terrific customer and partner relationships – and accelerating momentum. This funding gives it the resources to capitalize on those assets and to build something truly great. The Company’s management team and Board are committed to do just that."

Comments

In the growing market of storage for video surveillance, Pivot3 was founded in 2003 in Houston, TX by former Compaq's engineers and moved its headquarters to Austin, TX two years ago. It also has offices in Spring, TX, Palo Alto, CA, Derby, UK and Dubai, UAE.

Before this financial round, previous ones were $24 million in third round of funding in January 2008 and $25 million in May 2010, total being now $100.5 million.

Since the beginning of the year, this latest $23 million round is the seventh one by a storage start-up and the highest amount received after the $52.5 million that got Code 42 Software, in offsite and online backup solutions.

For capacity-intensive markets, Pivot3 provides failover-protected virtual machines inside an IP SAN, eliminating the cost, power and rack space of physical servers, as well as dedicated failover hardware.

Its products include:

vSTAC VDI: scale-out SSD/disk storage appliance and multiple VMs to address virtual server and surveillance workloads

P3 - VDI starter appliance

vSTAC Watch - stackable surveillance appliance

CloudBank - scale-out disk storage appliance and single VM

DataBank - scale-out disk storage appliance

Note also in the staff of 66 employees:

Former CEO Robert Fernander, now chief business development officer and EVP, corporate accounts, former CEO of Surgient Networks and StoredIQ

Curt Wittich, VP and GM Americas, who had VP roles with Pillar and previously at HDS

Deborah MacCallum, VP engineering, who held senior-level positions at EMC, where she worked on cloud-based systems, was VP engineering at Voyence, acquired by EMC, and served as VP of development and co-founder at SilverBack Technologies, purchased by Dell

Mark Modica, just appointed to the newly-created position of VP of business development, video surveillance.

Companies - alone or with partners - involved
in storage for video surveillance include:

Aberdeen

Axis

Cisco

Connexed

D-Link

DataDirect Networks

DNF

Dot Hill

EMC

HDS