Skyport Systems picks up $30M from Google Ventures

Targeting market with $15.1 billion in revenue last quarter, Skyport wants piece of the server pie

Skyport Systems, provider of secure server systems, announced today that it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round led by GV (Google Ventures) with participation from Cisco Investments, Thomvest Ventures, Northgate Capital, and InstantScale, in addition to existing investors Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Intel Capital.

The company has raised a total of $67 million to date.

As with many other IT-centric companies, Skyport seeks to address the same old problem: server infrastructure is inherently expensive, constantly growing in complexity, reducing application performance, and, perhaps most problematic, not getting more effective.

SkySecure, the company’s flagship solution, goes about solving this problem in a unique way: by rearchitecting the x86 hardware and software stack with a dedicated security "co-processor" built in. Visually, Skyport presents the concept like this when compared with legacy solutions:



The platform—made up of SkySecure System, SkySecure Compartment, and SkySecure Center—aims to offer increased security, simpler compliance enforcement, and lower operational risk and complexity when compared with those legacy solutions.

SkySecure launched in May 2015 and has since been adopted by government entities, colleges and universities, and businesses (from small and medium to the enterprise). Customers include Intel Security Group, Juniper Networks, Plex, The NPD Group, Accunet Solutions, Carahsoft, Kraft Kennedy, Rambus, and Snowflake Computing.

“Skyport’s next-generation infrastructure is based on a zero-trust approach that assumes all networks are continually breached,” said GV general partner Dave Munichiello in a prepared statement. “Their solution integrates security, virtualization, and policy into a pre-configured, managed-infrastructure platform -- essentially a hardened server that is constantly communicating and verifying its security state."

In case you’re wondering what we’re doing talking about a server company in 2016: the server market is huge and growing. Capturing just a small piece of the pie would be a huge win for Skyport.

For the last quarter of 2015, worldwide server revenue grew 8.2 percent (compared to the same period in 2014) to $15.1 billion, according to Gartner. And that was just one quarter. For the full year of 2015, the analyst firm says revenue grew by 10.1 percent and shipments grew 9.9 percent.

The biggest names in server shipments are major Silicon Valley stalwarts like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell, IBM, Lenovo, and Cisco—and that last name brings us back full circle because Cisco Investments participated in Skyport’s latest round.

Skyport says it will use the new funding to expand sales, marketing, and research and development.