Panzura Closes $32 Million Growth Capital Round

Panzura, Inc., in hybrid cloud storage, announced a new $32 million growth capital round led by Matrix Partners and joined by Meritech Capital Partners, Opus Capital, Chevron Technology Ventures and Western Digital Corp. as well as an undisclosed strategic investor.  

The new financing will be used to lead the transformation of the $32 billion on premise storage market spend to a cloud first storage model. It will also be used to expand Panzura’s hybrid cloud storage offerings for high performance database and virtual workloads, big data analytics and IoT applications.

Panzura had record growth in 2016, including adding over 100 new enterprise customers and expanding its channel and alliance presence with cloud providers AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft Azure. It added over 26 new petabytes of enterprise storage in 2016 and its hybrid cloud NAS, archive and collaboration storage products were deployed in over 33 countries across industries and governments.

“We invest in large market disruptions and there isn’t a larger disruption than the transition to the cloud,” said Andy Verhalen, general partner, Matrix Partners.  “We are excited to lead this growth round as the company expands its portfolio and accelerates its market traction in moving customers to a cloud first storage model.”  

Companies and agencies such as Chevron and DOJ replaced their traditional NAS and archive environments with Panzura to move to hybrid cloud storage and reduce their costs by 70%. In addition, customers such as Milwaukee Tool and Fluor utilize the distributed file system to deliver multi-million dollar projects to market on time. Panzura is further leveraging its strategic hybrid cloud architecture to consolidate additional storage protocols for high value workloads – database, virtual, analytics and IoT – and scale storage into the cloud.

“The on premises storage model is outdated, expensive and collapsing under its own weight,” said Patrick Harr, CEO, Panzura. “With a cloud first model and Panzura, customers can modernize their storage architectures, reduce their costs and scale on demand without the overhead and capital required before.  We are excited about the new round as it enables us to expand our reach to new customers and markets that will benefit from the significant shift from the dying, on premise storage model to hybrid cloud storage.“