EMC and NetApp Veterans' Startup Igneous Raises $23.6M

Igneous Systems, a Seattle, Wash.-based company founded by storage technology veterans who come from Isilon Systems, EMC and NetApp, closed a $23.6 million Series A funding round.

The startup says little about what exactly it is planning to do other than promising a new approach to building, maintaining and scaling enterprise data center infrastructure. The sizeable round will fund product development and expansion of the company's engineering and leadership teams.

Igneous CEO Kiran Bhageshpur spent the last six years in senior engineering roles at Isilon, a scale-out NAS storage company acquired by EMC in 2010. He continued working for EMC after the acquisition, most recently as vice president of engineering, running product development for the Isilon division.

Byron Rakitzis, chief architect at Igneous, was NetApp's first employee (other than the storage giant's founders) and holds about 30 storage and file-system technology patents. His most recent assignment at NetApp was on the company's all-Flash storage team.

Third member of the founding team, Jeff Hughes, spent years doing product engineering at Isilon. Two years after the acquisition, he became director of engineering at EMC's Isilon division. At Igneous, Hughes is vice president of engineering.

Not revealing much about the company's plans, Bhageshpur said it was going to bring to market a cloud solution that "solves some of today's most complex engineering challenges."

The funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures and Isilon co-founder, Sujal Patel. The company had previously raised a $3 million seed round led by Madrona, with participation from Redpoint.

Matt Mcllwain, managing director at Madrona, said the startup brought together three of Seattle's leading technology visionaries and that its team already comprised of top talent from cloud pioneers, including Amazon Web Services. "We are excited to have seeded and incubated Igneous and look forward to playing a role in the success of Seattle's next great enterprise technology company," he said.