Nimble Storage Closes $40.7 Million In Over-Subscribed Mezzanine Funding Round

Nimble Storage, Inc. has received $40.7 million in an over-subscribed mezzanine funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.

All other existing Nimble investors participated in the round, and the company welcomed GGV Capital as an investor. Nimble Storage will use the funding across its operations, with major emphasis on propelling growth in sales, engineering and international market development. To date, Nimble Storage has raised $98 million.

In a market characterized by increasing acceptance of flash memory for higher performance, and an ever-increasing number of new storage start-ups, Nimble stands out for its rapid pace of customer acquisition and deployments. In two years since first shipping in August, 2010, it has sold over 1,000 deployments. Customers include leaders across a range of industries, among them Grocery Outlet, City of Cupertino, First Choice Health, Plaxo, Berkeley Research Group, San Mateo Credit Union, Premier Medical, Northrim Bank, San Diego Convention Center, Vision Critical, Imagine Learning and Graniterock. In the most recent quarter alone, Nimble Storage acquired more than 175 new customers.

The funding will enable Nimble to accelerate customer adoption through increased investments across its operations. The new round also positions the company to more rapidly broaden its European presence and to expedite plans to establish a presence and partnerships in the AsiaPac region.

"Nimble Storage has delivered groundbreaking innovations and fundamentally reinvented the modern storage system," said Jim Goetz, general partner, Sequoia Capital. "The company has emerged to become a dominant force in data storage, and its market traction far outpaces other storage entrants of the past few years."

"Right out of the gate, Nimble Storage established itself as a company that could redefine the data storage landscape – and it has," said Ping Li, partner, Accel Partners. "Nimble has clearly pulled away from the storage giants and flash-based start-ups alike, and proven its value across an amazing 1,000-plus deployments in the enterprise. Our investment in Nimble continues to deliver high long-term value."

"We’re gratified by the immense acceptance we’ve received from customers across a wide range of markets, and by the continued trust of our backers," said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. "While most flash-based startups have concentrated narrowly on high-performance niches, we’ve leveraged flash into a much broader technology platform that delivers superior system performance, capacity efficiency, data protection, scalability, simplicity and overall ROI for mainstream enterprise applications. With our financial performance well ahead of our most aggressive estimates, we’re continuing to reinvest across all areas of our operations as we advance towards an IPO and become an industry leader in the market evolution to flash-optimized storage."