Storage Start-Up Qumulo Closes $24.5 Million in Series A

Qumulo, Inc., an enterprise storage company, announced it has raised $24.5 million in a Series A round of financing led by Highland Capital Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partnerswww.valhallapartners.com.

Founded in March 2012
with seed funding from Valhalla Partners, Qumulo is solving the
manageability, scalability and efficiency problems that plague the $35
billion enterprise data storage market.

The company will use the
funding for product development and to substantially grow its
Seattle-based engineering and leadership teams. As part of the
investment, Peter Bell, general partner at Highland Capital Partners,
joins the board of directors.

Data growth, application
requirements, and technology shifts are disrupting enterprise data
storage. End-users double the amount of data they store every two years,
creating enormous manageability and efficiency problems for enterprise
IT. At the same time, virtualized workloads create random access
patterns that place tremendous stress on traditional storage systems. To
meet these challenges, application owners and IT operations managers
increasingly demand rapid innovation, operational scale and
administrative productivity.

Qumulo is poised to address these pain points based on its executive team’s experience in the enterprise storage market.
The company was co-founded by the primary architects of Isilon’s OneFS
file system, which changed the way data centers store and manage
petabytes of data. Isilon was acquired by EMC in 2010 for $2.25 billion.

Qumulo CEO Peter Godman was the former director of software engineering at Isilon and previous CEO of Corensic. He is joined by Qumulo CTO Aaron Passey, former chief architect at Isilon and CTO at Clustrix, and VP of engineering Neal Fachan, previously an engineer at Isilon and principal engineer at Amazon. Rounding out the Qumulo executive team is VP of Product Management Jeff Cobb, who previously served as chief scientist at Wily Technology (now part of CA) and SVP strategy at CA.

"A new category of storage is needed to manage the proliferation of data that enterprises face," said Peter Bell, general partner at Highland Capital Partners. "Data
that doubles every two years, a growing scarcity of storage
administrators, and the advent of shared, virtualized environments put
tremendous pressure on storage systems. Qumulo has the right strategy
and team to drive a leadership position in the market."

"Based
on our previous work with Qumulo’s executive team and their track
record of success, we believe the company has the ideal foundation to
create the next disruptive storage solution for enterprise IT," said Matt McIlwain, MD at Madrona Venture Group. "We
have been closely involved with Isilon Systems and Amazon, two hugely
influential companies in the storage space, and believe Qumulo will fuel
further innovation in the market."

"Qumulo’s team of enterprise storage experts is positioned to
solve the problems introduced by the confluence of three huge trends in
enterprise IT – consumerization, SSD technology, and commoditization," said Charles Curran, general partner at Valhalla Partners. "The
next five years will bring a variety of new approaches to deal with the
massive explosion of data and its manageability, and Qumulo will be at
the forefront of that revolution."

"This funding round
provides us with expert guidance from storage investors Peter Bell and
Matt McIlwain and sets the stage for a rapid growth trajectory," said Peter Godman, CEO of Qumulo. "The combined insight and collective wisdom of our investors will accelerate our vision for the future of data storage."