Avere Raises $20 Million in Series-D Round Led by Western Digital

Avere Systems, Inc. has raised an additional $20 million in venture financing, bringing the total amount invested in the company to $72 million.

The Series-D funding round was led by Western Digital Capital, the investment arm of Western Digital Corp., with participation from previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital.

The funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing and continued development of the company’s hybrid cloud storage solutions.

Avere’s approach bucks the costly trend of ramping up physical storage capacity and performance through purchasing bigger storage servers loaded with an exorbitant amount of disks or flash, and then connecting them to higher-bandwidth pipes. Instead, Avere has invented a flexible, software-defined storage tiering methodology that fosters intelligent use of multiple storage technologies (RAM, SSD, SAS and SATA) that can negate the weaknesses of one type of media or accelerate underutilized strengths in another. The company offers a lineup of products that are optimized according to workload requirements ranging from small enterprise to the intense storage scenarios.

“The reality for 99% of enterprises is they will operate increasingly in a hybrid IT storage environment for many years to come. This means that no single storage technology will win, and both on-premises and cloud storage will be required to achieve cost and performance goals,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO, Avere. “With this Series-D funding round, we continue to scale the company so that we can provide the best solutions to customers embarking on their hybrid cloud path.”

“We are impressed with the Avere management team’s continued ability to execute on its plan to make hybrid cloud storage a reality for enterprises,” said John Jarve, managing partner, Menlo Ventures. “Now that the company has proven to deliver NAS-quality performance in a hybrid cloud environment, we expect mainstream enterprises to adopt this new technology at a rapid rate over the next 18-24 months.“

“Over the course of the past five years, Avere Systems has developed and refined unique technology to change how storage is delivered,” said Matthew Howard, managing partner, Norwest Venture Partners. “We are pleased with Avere’s success, and are proud to provide follow-on investments in the company as it further establishes its industry leadership.”