Pavilion Data Raises $45 Million

Pavilion Data Systems, Inc. announced successes on multiple fronts in 2021, underscoring the demand for its data analytics platform and laying the groundwork for increased momentum in 2022.

It raised a $45 million round led by Kleiner Perkins and Artiman Ventures.

This funding, combined with the growth of its customer base, strong business momentum, and key executive hires, including Dario Zamarian as CEO, to address the increasing need for a high-performance, dense, and scale-out flash storage platform for analytics and AI/ML applications.  

“Pavilion is proving its market acceptance across a broad range of industry verticals as an analytics acceleration platform for legacy and next-gen applications,” he noted. “2021 saw the company grow its employee base by 50% across all functions. This, combined with additional funding from our investors, our expanded leadership team, and the strong position of our flagship HyperParallel Data Platform will enable us to take data analytics acceleration to the next level.”

Pavilion’s total outside capital investment increased to $107 million after this $45 million round.

All existing investors participated in the funding, including Korea Investment Partners, SK Telecom Ventures, Taiwania Capital, Tyche Partners, DAG Ventures, and RPS Ventures. This investment round also was joined by new investors Mirae Asset, Liberty Street Advisors, Inc. and Gaingels LLC.

“Many organizations in the federal and commercial space are already using Pavilion to make the most of their applications and accelerate their workloads,” stated Wen Hsieh, partner, Kleiner Perkins. “Pavilion’s platform enables users to build a bridge between their existing and future needs. We see that its unique ability to accelerate legacy as well as next-gen applications is making it a prime choice for many users. My partners and I are excited to have co-led this round, as the funding will help Pavilion establish itself as a leader in the data analytics and AI/ML acceleration market.”

In 2021 Pavilion increased deployments within federal agencies and increased penetration into analytics use cases in Fortune 500 companies, including a top-20 banking institution, a top credit agency, and one of the largest hedge funds in the country. Nearly 80% of all deployments were to accelerate analytics, legacy and next-gen, ML, and streaming applications. It doubled its new customers, and customer loyalty remains strong with 75% of its 2020 customers repurchasing in 2021. The firm also opened new sales offices in Atlanta, GA, Boston MA, and London, UK, and it directly addressed the public sector by opening a sales division focused on federal government customers to support its strong presence in the federal space. The company continued its expansion into the life sciences, financial, and M&E industry verticals.

“We needed an external storage platform that matched the performance we get from internal NVMe SSDs to support a mission critical SQL analytics use case running on VMware 7,” said Ken Boyer, director global dtorage MGMT, IQVIA. “The Pavilion platform enabled us to meet this challenging requirement that could not be met with other options. It’s really exciting to see this recognition and endorsement of Pavilion by the investment community to build upon their momentum and accelerate their roadmap. We look forward to seeing continued momentum of their data analytics acceleration platform.”

“We have been working with Pavilion for the last couple of years and have had great success with some of our large federal customers,” said Herb Ahmuty, senior solutions architect, Meadowgate. “The Pavilion platform has helped a couple of our customers address the challenging data-ingest and performance needs of their demanding analytics workloads. Given the rapidly changing nature of technology, Pavilion’s agility has enabled our customers to be more responsive to their growing data sets and expanded application environments. It’s great to see continued support of Pavilion from the investment community.”

To build out the next phase of company development, Pavilion added to its executive suite with the hiring of a chief marketing/product officer, SVP of software development, VP of operations, and VP marketing.

Awards Granted to Pavilion Data Systems:
• In May 2021, Frost & Sullivan recognized the company with its North American Technology Award, citing its innovative approach to NVME-oF.
• In January 2022, DCIG named the vendor as one of the Top 5 Storage Solutions for Life Sciences. Pavilion’s data analytics acceleration platform, consisting of the HyperParallel File System and HyperOS, was singled out among 15 contending providers for having exceptional performance, deployment capability, data protection, and technical support, among other factors.
• In January 2022, GigaOm named the firm as a Fast Mover” in the GigaOm Radar for High-Performance Scale-Out File Systems,” claiming that Pavilion provides “a compelling, no-compromise architecture built around NVMe and maximum performance,” “one of the greatest GPUDirect implementations available,” “a superb security-oriented architecture,” and “great scalability and performance.”

“Demands for data are growing rapidly, so Pavilion’s ability to provide high-speed data ingest feeding an analytics pipeline aligns it perfectly to the reality of today’s market,” said Christian Munafo, chief investment officer and portfolio manager, Liberty Street Advisors. “Plus, its ultra-low latency keeps data flowing in high-performance-database and high-performance-virtualization workloads. Our team proudly supports Pavilion’s compelling technology that meets the challenges of demanding data analytics market environments.”

Sam Hong, director, Mirae Asset, affirmed the factors that propelled company’s successes in 2021 by stating, “Pavilion empowers enterprises to reduce their data center costs by consolidating storage islands. Its efficiencies and highly advanced abilities to streamline big data workloads are very attractive to customers.”

More about Pavilion HyperParallel Data Platform