Huge $101 Million Funding Round for Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. has closed its $101 million series D financing co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures.

Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Greenspring Associates also participated in the round as new investors, joining existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures in the largest single financing round in the history of the converged infrastructure market.

The company has now raised a total of $172.2 million in four rounds of funding.

It will use the new funding to accelerate its global expansion, boost investments in R&D, expand its service delivery capabilities and grow its sales, marketing and support teams.

Nutanix is now capitalized to service the needs of global enterprise customers with backing from top Silicon Valley venture capital firms and strategic investments from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital (a private equity fund within Morgan Stanley Investment Management), two leading global financial institutions; Riverwood, an investor with strong contacts and expertise in global high-tech manufacturing; and SAP Ventures, an independent venture firm affiliated with SAP AG, with an understanding of large scale enterprise applications, markets and customers.

Jeff Parks, a founding partner of Riverwood Capital and former executive at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., has been named to the Nutanix board of directors.

In a separate appointment, industry veteran Mike Scarpelli, CFO of ServiceNow and former CFO of Data Domain, has also been named to Nutanix’s board of directors.

“Nutanix is one of a very small class of companies that is transforming the way enterprises deliver IT,” said Jeff Parks, founding partner, Riverwood Capital. “We are very excited to partner with Dheeraj Pandey and his world-class management team as they build the next-generation enterprise computing company.”

“Nutanix represents the future of datacenter infrastructure and is a best-in-class platform to run all virtualized enterprise workloads,” said Jai Das, MD, SAP Ventures. “We look forward to assisting the team on closer alignment with enterprise business applications – a critical component to accelerating Nutanix’s growth within Global 2000 organizations – and helping the company leverage the SAP ecosystem.”

Nutanix has exceeded $100 million in lifetime sales and acquired 13 customers who have purchased more than $1 million of products within two years of launching its Virtual Computing Platform, cementing its status as the fastest-growing infrastructure company of the decade.

Due to a global expansion strategy, international sales now account for 33% of the business and the company has shipped product to more than 30 countries in the last six months.

“Lightspeed has invested in more than 200 companies and Nutanix ranks best-in-class in terms of sales velocity,” said Ravi Mhatre, founding partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We continue to be impressed with the execution by the company and welcome our new investors to the team.”

“Adoption of web-scale computing, and Nutanix’s Virtual Computing Platform in particular, has grown explosively over the last two years, yet we’ve only scratched the surface of this $100 billion hybrid computing market,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. “The additional support from such a high-quality investor group leaves us uniquely positioned to capitalize on the opportunity and build one of the elite companies of this decade.”

Enterprises including eBay, McKesson, Toyota, Orange Business Services and Hyundai Hysco have adopted Nutanix as their infrastructure platform for running high-performance virtualized workloads. These organizations seek the simplicity, scalability and efficiency of web-scale datacenters, such as those operated by Google and Facebook, to power their private cloud environments.

“Nutanix represents a significant improvement to the simplicity of large scale datacenter architecture,” said Drew Trieger, virtualization architect, eBay. “We had considered alternative solutions from established players as well as newer companies, but none could match the combination of performance, compact footprint, ease of use and flexibility of the Nutanix platform. Today’s investment round validates our decision to choose Nutanix and ensures they will continue to deliver innovative solutions to our datacenter challenges for years to come.“

Nutanix’s commitment to developing game-changing technology and providing customer support coupled with its scale-out architecture has enabled the company to achieve repeat purchase rates.

“More than 50% of Nutanix customers purchase again after only six months and nearly 70% purchase additional units within 12 months,” said Ken Long, VP of accounting, Nutanix.