Benioff, Luczo Join VCs in $35M Round for PernixData

Closing out a record fiscal year Silicon Valley storage virtualization startup PernixData announced it has closed an oversubscribed funding round, raising $35 million in a combination of venture capital and individual investments from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Silver Lake partner Jim Davidson and Seagate CEO Steve Luczo. Menlo Ventures led the Series C with participation from previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Lightspeed Ventures, Lane Bess, Mark Leslie and John Thompson.

Funding from institutions and industry luminaries alike helps validate PernixData's storage acceleration software and business strategy. Closing its first full fiscal year this summer, the company's CEO Poojan Kumar said it experienced 42 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth and a record year for booked revenue.

The company describes its flagship FVP software as taking advantage of both server flash and RAM as a platform for storage acceleration with unique features like write acceleration, clustering and installation within the hypervisor. It further augments virtualized environments and addresses storage I/O bottlenecks with a Flash Hypervisor to allow server flash to be aggregated across a virtualized data center.

The company has partnered with leading flash vendors and almost 250 resellers around the world, including a global resale agreement with Dell. PernixData claims that in April of this year FVP became the first acceleration solution to run on both flash and RAM and to support any file, block or direct attached storage.

PernixData co-founders Kumar and Satyam Vaghani founded the company in 2012 after careers at VMware. FVP software currently only supports the VMware hypervisor.

Mark Siegel, managing director at Menlo Ventures, has joined the PernixData board in an advisory role. The company's executive team has expanded, joined by former Dell manager Mike Arterbury as vice president of business development.

“We are witnessing a fundamental shift in storage design where performance is decoupled from capacity using PernixData FVP software and server side flash,” Seagate CEO Luczo said. “This brings unparalleled performance and scalability to virtualized applications and makes flash technology a strategic component of tomorrow’s software defined data center.”