Pliops Secures $100 Million in Series D Funding

Pliops Ltd. closed a $100 million series D funding round, bringing total investment in the company to more than $200 million since its founding in 2017.

Led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) – with SK hynix, Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of Walden International, and State of Mind Ventures Momentum, in addition to previous investors also participating in the round – this latest investment will be used to address the broad market opportunity for the Pliops Extreme Data Processor (XDP).

The start-up will continue to build out its semiconductor, hardware and software roadmap, while driving its vision of re-architecting the data stack and bringing ultra-scalability to data centers with customers and partners. In parallel, the company is streamlining its global operations and team of experts in recognition of a changing business landscape.

“Accessing and using your data efficiently is critical to business success – particularly in a world of exponential data growth and storage requirements,” said Eli Groner, MD, KDT. “Pliops brings novel solutions to this enormous industry-wide challenge that address real pain points.”

By reliably accelerating performance in existing and new data centers, the XDP extends potential to crunch, store, analyze and move data. The company helps companies get more from their growing data volumes and data center footprint, leading to reduced costs and energy consumption.

“As NVMe storage becomes even more critical for data-intensive applications and workloads in the data center, we continue to invest in innovative technologies that tackle bottlenecks in traditional infrastructure,” said Jin Lim, Head of Solution Lab (SOLAB) at SK hynix. “Pliops technology is well-aligned with our storage, and we consider it an important tool and stepping stone toward next-gen storage systems that maximize the potential of data applications, including AI/ML and data analytics.“

Pliops continues to secure customers in a range of market segments – including global cloud service providers, enterprises and HPC – all of whom are seeking to accelerate and scale a wide range of data-intensive workloads.

“The ability to monetize data faster and get much more while paying much less is the core priority of every organization, especially in times of market volatility,” noted Uri Beitler, Pliops founder and CEO. “Our transformative product offers this exact unique capability, making it imminent that XDP will be the cornerstone of every modern data center. With the trust of our existing customers and partners, and our commitment to align company resources with the current economic climate, this funding round will accelerate our market adoption and help move us closer to becoming the market leader.”

Comments

This is a significant round for Pliops passing the barrier of $200 million and getting closer to the famous $1 billion valuation. It confirms once again that this xPU, with x being different from C and G, is a hot market already populated by several key vendors of any size addressing various needs.

There are different approaches from Broadcom, Dell, Eideticom, Ethernity Networks, Fungible, GigaIO, GRAID, HPE, Intel, Kalray, Kioxia, Lightbits Labs, Liqid, Marvell, Nebulon, Netint, Netronome, NGD, Nvidia, Nyriad, Pensando now AMD, Pliops, Samsung, ScaleFlux, Seagate or Xilinx also an AMD company, to name a few.

Pliops, one of the dedicated players in that area, illustrates perfectly that NVMe has changed the storage world positively and open new areas of development to solve next gen workloads challenges in many vertical industries but also classic IT. But NVMe is not enough, it operates as a enabler to build and design new comprehensive solutions. Having some dedicated processing board is not new in the industry as we remember what Silicon Graphics did 30 years ago with its graphic board with the Onyx machine for instance. Once again, new data centers with more and more high demanding applications processing tons of data require such approaches.

Pliops has shared a recent slide splitting the market into different areas with various xPU, CS and what the company is doing with its XDP. Again it's the famous question of blue and red ocean, do you create a category and you're alone and nobody can compare you. We have plenty of example of that or do you join a growing market, already a bit red, that is recognized as a real need for users, a strong answer for data centers.

The company with its XPD - eXtreme Data Processor - card is a new animal in the jungle with some specific capabilities like advanced data protection, endurance algorithm exposing a block or a native KV interface. XDP can complement any storage, SQL or NoSQL databases, analytics within any cloud instances. With embedded core storage functions, XDP boosts and replaces CPU-based storage and data management functions and even extends this with databases storage engines such InnoDB, WiredTiger or RocksDB. Some users can named this model a modern storage controller, going well beyond a RAID card with data processing capacity leveraging NVMe, even if we consider this as a reduction of the card capabilities. Some other name this model a storage controller but clearly DPU seems to better the right term even if it exists different flavors of it, things are converging as well.

We also expect some new iterations for the XDP, some key partnerships especially on the connectivity side with players like Fungible for instance. Next few months on this segment will be very interesting.