$32 Million Series B for Stratoscale

Stratoscale Ltd., the software platform for hyper-convergence, announced its series B funding of $32 million, led by Intel Capital, with participation by Cisco Investments and SanDisk Corp., as well as other investors including the original series A investors, Battery Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP).

Stratoscale’s distributed data center OS transforms standard x86 servers into a hyper-converged infrastructure solution combining performance storage with cloud services while supporting both containers and virtualization on the same platform.

Its rack-scale architecture takes advantage of hardware used in today’s data centers. Delivering convergence at this scale requires new thinking, which has led to a solution delivering higher performance and higher efficiency in data center operations. Plug and play architecture supports OpenStack and Docker, and provides performance storage on any x86 architecture.

“Stratoscale’s software helps customers optimize their data center infrastructure to meet the needs of both existing and new applications,” said Jason Waxman, VP and GM, cloud platforms group, Intel. “By intelligently aggregating heterogeneous infrastructure into shared pools of compute, network and storage resources, Stratoscale is addressing the need for greater efficiency of application management at scale.”

Directors Uri Arazi and Andy Fligel led the investment for Intel Capital, working with MDs Marcos Battisti and Dave Flanagan.

“Stratoscale’s promising architecture offers exciting new potential to quickly deliver flash storage benefits to the data center in a new and highly flexible way,” said Rene Hartner, VP of corporate business development, SanDisk. “Our investment and collaboration with Stratoscale complements SanDisk’s leadership in enterprise storage and furthers our commitment to drive the development and adoption of innovative, next-generation technologies that can transform the data center.”

“StratoScale’s approach to the convergence of data center infrastructure components, delivered at the rack-level, is unique in the marketplace and has the potential to enable efficient pooling of different Infrastructure-as-a-Service resources for enterprises and cloud service providers,” said Yoav Samet, VP, corporate development, Cisco. “We are excited to help drive innovation in Israel through this investment in an accomplished team.”

“With over $40 million total funding since inception, we are positioned to deliver the first pure-play software architecture for hyper-convergence,” said Stratoscale co-founder and CEO Ariel Maislos. “Our customers are telling us we have unique technology and new ideas which are reinventing virtualization at scale. This additional funding will allow us to complete our product development as well as build out global sales and marketing.”

“Stratoscale is onto something foundational in enterprise IT,” said Scott Tobin, general partner at Battery Ventures. “Today’s data centers are looking for solutions which help increase overall efficiency. Stratoscale’s technology delivers this in a software-based solution which allows customers to select their own hardware platforms to run on.”

“We are encouraged by the market and technical progress Stratoscale has made since our initial investment last year,” said Adam Fisher, partner, BVP. “Its compelling, developer-friendly approach enables companies of all sizes to run anything and store everything; simply and efficiently.”

One year ago, Stratoscale announced its first $10 million funding from Battery Ventures and BVP, who are both investors in this second round. .

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In hyper convergence virtualization compute and storage software