Violin Memory raises $40M for Flash

Faith Merino · June 7, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1b43

The round comes on the heels of Violin's February Series B round, in which it scored $35M

Memory Array provider Violin Memory announced Tuesday its $40 million Series C round of funding raised from existing investors, bringing the company’s total raised to more than $105 million in equity. This round comes just four months after Violin Memory raised a $35 million Series B round led by Juniper Networks and Toshiba Corporation.

Founded in 2005, the Mountain View-based company is one of the many competing in the flash technology industry. Violin’s Memory Arrays combine software, Toshiba NAND flash, DRAM, and distributed processing to create a flexible and scalable solution for a wide range of different structures, including Network Attached Storage, local clusters, and QFabric data centers from Juniper Networks.

Flash memory has been all the rage as everything from cameras, smartphones, and now even whole laptops (the Macbook Air) run entirely on Flash memory. Violin, however, doesn’t just focus on the speediness of individual servers, but rather providing flash-based memory storage for use on multiple servers. CEO Donald Basile estimates that Violin’s system is 100 times faster than in hardware that uses disk drives. He also pegs Violin as the fastest growing storage company in the last decade.

On the sunny forecast for Flash, Gartner claims:  “The enterprise storage industry is witnessing a 100 year flood of innovation and a deluge of new vendors. Companies that are able to provide superior enterprise solid-state solutions combined with differentiated software will be best positioned to exploit the $4.2 billion market opportunity in 2015.”

The new capital will be used to ramp up product development and global expansion in Europe and Asia, which Basile says will help the company surpass $100 million in revenue for the year.

The investors in this round were undisclosed, other than to say they are previous Violin investors. Basile told me that while the company has raised $105 million in equity, the company also acquired the assets of Gear6 in June 2010, which had some $40 million in venture capital invested in it.

“If you add up the public Violin funding and what was invested in Gear6, the total is on the order of $165 million,” said Basile.  “In addition, we have $140 million of debt and credit facilities to support manufacturing in this equity round. This is Violin's first use of debt and credit.”

Image source: versatyledesign.com

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