New year, new funding for data storage companies in the Boston area.
The latest beneficiary is Needham, MA-based Kaminario, which today announced it received $75 million from investors. Private equity firm Waterwood led the round, with contributions from Sequoia, Pitango Venture Capital, Lazarus, Silicon Valley Bank, and Globespan Capital Partners.
Kaminario said it has raised $218 million from investors to date, making it one of the better-funded tech companies in the Boston area and in the data storage sector. The new money also puts it on the short list of local companies to watch for an IPO or sale.
Founded in 2008, Kaminario sells all-solid-state data storage systems to large enterprise customers, in sectors like retail, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. As businesses shift their data storage to the cloud, bring more and more connected devices online, and contend with an ever-growing deluge of data, Kaminario and other firms are pushing all-flash storage systems as their best option for housing all that information.
But it’s a crowded industry. Kaminario is up against established giants like Dell EMC and IBM, as well as heavily funded newer players such as Tegile, which is backed by more than $141 million from investors, according to Crunchbase; Pure Storage, which raised $425 million in an IPO in 2015; and SolidFire, which was acquired by NetApp in 2015 for $870 million.
In a press release, Kaminario said it plans to use the new funding to scoop up more customers around the world and further develop its products, including making it easier for them to integrate with related software and hardware technologies from other vendors.
The company will also hire an undisclosed number of people, primarily in research and development and sales and marketing, according to a statement e-mailed to Xconomy. Kaminario currently employs about 275 people and is led by founder and CEO Dani Golan.
About 50 of the employees are located in Massachusetts, and the rest work at offices in London, Paris, Seoul, and Yokneam, Israel, the company said in the e-mailed statement. The Israel office is Kaminario’s R&D headquarters.
