Infinidat, the six-year-old data-storage firm led by EMC co-founder Moshe Yanai, announced today it has bagged $95 million from investors.
The Series C funding round was led by Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, and earlier backer TPG Growth contributed. The company’s private investors now value Infinidat at $1.6 billion, according to a press release. Its last investment—a $150 million Series B round in 2015—gave Infinidat a $1.2 billion valuation. The company’s total venture capital haul is now $325 million.
But here’s an arguably more important metric of Infinidat’s growth—the company says it is now profitable. Infinidat, which began selling its flagship product in 2014, says its revenue has increased in 13 straight quarters. (It’s hard to check all of this, of course, since Infinidat is privately held and doesn’t release audited financials.) Its customers include large telecommunications firms, banks, and cloud service providers.
Infinidat makes data storage arrays that combine flash storage with conventional hard disk drives. The company says it uses machine learning algorithms to extract better performance and reliability out of low-cost hardware. The company says the system, which it calls the Infinibox, has room for 5 petabytes of data.
Infinidat has dual headquarters in Waltham, MA, and Herzliya, Israel. It employs 500 people across all of its offices, which are located in 17 countries, according to the press release.
It’s been a busy year for data-storage companies and other IT infrastructure businesses in New England. Investors have made big bets on the local sector, including a $75 million investment in flash-storage provider Kaminario, a $50 million round for virtualization and cloud management software maker Turbonomic, a $46 million investment in cloud management software company CloudHealth Technologies, and a $38 million investment in cloud storage firm Nasuni.
Meanwhile, new players have emerged, including Wasabi Technologies, a data-storage startup from Carbonite founders David Friend and Jeff Flowers. There has also been consolidation—Hewlett Packard Enterprise purchased SimpliVity for $650 million, while DataGravity was sold to HyTrust.
It will be worth watching which path Infinidat takes. It’s probably time to put the firm on the short list of local tech IPO candidates, but it could also be an acquisition target for bigger players in the IT sector.
