Start-Up’s Profile: Pure Storage

Company
Pure Storage, Inc. (formerly using code name Os76, Inc.)

Location
HQs in Mountain View, CA, support operations center in Salt Lake City, UT, European HQs in UK, offices in 20 countries (including Austria, The Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Denmark, Poland, Germany, Japan, Korea, Australia, Switzerland and Singapore), subsidiary in Japan

Founded in
October 2009

Financial funding
$5 million (series A) funding in 2009 and $20 million (series B) in 2010 then $30 million (series C) in 2011, and $40 million in 2012 (series D); initial funding came from Sutter Hill Ventures, led by its MD Mike Speiser, this VC formerly investing in several storage companies including Data Domain, Data Robotics, LSI Logic, NetApp and ProStor, other investors being Samsung Ventures Investment Corporation, In-Q-Tel, Redpoint Ventures, Max Volpi at Index Ventures, Aneel Bhusri of Greylock Partners, and Mark Leslie.

$150 million in series E in August 2013 led by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Tiger Global Management LLC and pro-rata by existing investors. This massive amount was one of highest round received by a storage company, but less than $250 million received in October 2011 in series B by Dropbox, a cloud backup company, also into storage and partly for enterprises.

Total financial funding finally reached $245 million. This is not a record in total financial funding for a storage start-up. Dropbox got $257.2 million up to now, Box.net $262 million. On top of that, Pillar Data Systems raised approximately $544 million before being acquired by Oracle in 2011.

Previously Data Domain CEO, Frank Slootman is one of the board’s director and one of angel investors that also include VMware’s co-founders former CEO Diane Green and former CTO Mendel Rosenblum. Among other directors, there are:

• Mike Speiser: served as a VP and technical advisor to Symantec CEO and chairman John Thompson; previously VP of product marketing and product management at Veritas
• Craig Harmer: founding engineer at Veritas working on VxFS and VxVM and then at Symantec
• Aneel Bhusri: former chairman of Data Domain
• Mark Leslie: founding chairman and CEO of Veritas; on the board of NetApp and Xsigo

Market cap
An IPO is on the work, though no exact date were disclosed. Most probably “confidential” filing at first. Market cap is in  the range of $1 billion according to SSD array manufacturer. CEO Dietzen does not consider his company being acquired.

Main executives

• Scott Dietzen, CEO: most recently interim SVP, applications at Yahoo!, where he helped look after Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra; joined Yahoo! with the acquisition of Web 2.0 and Web 2.0/open source messaging and collaboration start-up Zimbra, where he was president and CTO
• David Hatfield, president: held leadership roles at Akamai Technologies, Veritas, Symantec, Limelight Networks and others
• John “Coz” Colgrove, co-founder and CTO: founding engineer at Veritas where he was behind VxFS File System and VxVM Volume Manager; Symantec fellow and VP of technology strategy for the company’s data center management group; at the advisory board of ParaScale
• John Hayes,  co-founder and chied architect: served in Yahoo!’s office of the chief technologist, where he investigated web architectures for collaborative development of highly-reliable systems
• Matt Kixmoeller, VP products: was VP of enterprise product management for Symantec’s information management products, including the NetBackup and Enterprise Vault
• Bob Wood, VP engineering: Before joining Harmonic/Omneon in 2009, Wood served as VP of file system engineering at NetApp
• Tood Engle, VP ops: was director of business operations at Computer Network Technologies, then VP of manufacturing at Xiotech for 12 years before joining Pure Storage in 2011.
• Michael Cornwell, VP AsiaPac: Storage Architect at Quantum, manager of storage engineering iPod Division at Apple, lead technologist for flash memory at Sun Microsystems before joining Pure Storage
• Matt Burr, VP America’s sales: in sales management with Symantec and Limelight Networks
• Joao “John” Silva, head of EMEA: Head of the 3PAR Ninja Team at HP, senior management roles at HDS and EMC; Joined Pure Storage in November 2012

Number of employees
Around 300 employees, hiring at a rate of 10 people per week; to be “well over 600 or 700 people by next year,” said Dietzen.

Revenue and profitability
Pure Storage said last August it achieved over 50% consecutive quarterly growth but didn’t reveal how much exactly and for which quarter. But its last massive round means that it needs money and is not yet profitable.

Technology
Flash arrays with fast, pre-deduped cloning of VMware VMs, compression, encryption, thin provisioning, instant snapshots, FC or Ethernet

Main products
FA-300 and FA-400 VMware-ready flash arrays series controller managed by Purity (V3.0) OS with up to 100TB of usable capacity on SSDs, the flash devices coming apparently from Samsung after coming from sTec.

Technology partners
Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, Citrix

Distributors
Partner focus company, with more than a 100 partners worldwide, including Applied Computer Systems, Ahead, AntemetA, CloudGov Technologies, Corus360, Dasher Technologies, Dewpoint, ePlus, EmFrontier, Integrated Archive Systems, Integrated Data Storage, Iron Bow Technologies, Kinney Group, NCE Computer Group (Europe), Observatory Crest, Polcom, Purity, Softcat, Tokyo Electron Device, and XIOSS

End users
Among them LinkedIn and Netflix, and also Riverview Hospital, French food company Picard, eMeter (Siemens Business), Yodle, Mattersight, Paylocity, and ARcare.

Target market
From SMBs to largest companies for virtual servers, OLTP databases, analytics and VDI.

Competitors
Mainly EMC with XtremIO (Dietzen said that his company is “18 months ahead of EMC“) and NetApp, but also 30 other firms currently in all-SSD subsystems.

Note: This article is an update of a former Start-Up’s Profile of the same company in February 2011.