Igneous Systems Closes $23.6 Million in Series A

Igneous Systems, Inc., a company that is reimagining the future of rapidly-expanding data center infrastructures, announced it has closed a $23.6 million Series A financing round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures and Isilon Systems co-founder, Sujal Patel.

The company had previously raised a $3 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Redpoint Ventures. The company will use the funding for product development and for significant expansion of its engineering and leadership teams.

As part of the funding, Ron Bernal, venture partner at NEA, joins the board of directors.

“With heavyweights like Microsoft, Amazon, F5 Networks, and EMC Isilon, Seattle is becoming a tech mecca in its own right, particularly when it comes to cloud technologies,” said Matt Mcllwain, MD, Madrona Venture Group. “Igneous brings together three of Seattle’s leading technology visionaries, who have already set about building a world-class team comprised of top talent from cloud pioneers including Amazon Web Services. We are excited to have seeded and incubated Igneous and look forward to playing a role in the success of Seattle’s next great enterprise technology company.”

Founded by three former leaders from Isilon Systems and NetApp, Igneous’ team brings business and engineering experience in the enterprise technology market.

•  CEO Kiran Bhageshpur has more than 20 years experience in enterprise technology, the last six of which he spent in engineering leadership roles at Isilon. Most recently, he served as the VP of engineering at EMC where he spearheaded all aspects of product development in the Isilon storage division.
• Byron Rakitzis, chief architect, has over 30 patents in storage and file systems. As the first non-founding employee of NetApp, Rakitzis was integral to the development of NetApp’s Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) and more recently worked on their all-flash storage solution.
• Jeff Hughes, VP of engineering, spent more than 8 years in product engineering at Isilon, serving as the director of engineering for EMC‘s Isilon storage division since 2012.

“We have been working the Igneous team since the beginning,” said Ron Bernal, venture partner, NEA. “This is a top flight team that knows how to execute at scale. We are pleased to be leading this funding round.“

“Cloud technologies have proven to be powerful change-agents across all segments of the enterprise IT landscape, providing infrastructure and services at unprecedented scale,” said Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO, Igneous. “This Series A round enables Igneous to accelerate development of our product as we work to transform the data center with a cloud solution that solves some of today’s most complex engineering challenges. The participation of NEA, Madrona, Redpoint and Sujal Patel also provides us with a wealth of entrepreneurial and technology experience on which to draw as we grow this company.”

Igneous exists to reset expectations about how best to build, maintain and scale enterprise data center infrastructures.