Earlier this month, Qumulo (pronounced as cume-u-low), a Seattle-based stealth storage startup not so secretly announced a $40 million B round investment to its gilded, rich coffers.
The smart storage company grabbed a healthy from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), with participation from existing inventors Madrona Venture Group, Highland Capital and Valhalla Partners who had previously added $27 million in a Series A funding round.
Company co-founder and CEO Peter Godman had previously cut his smart storage teeth during the Dot Com bubble at Isilon, a storage company sold to EMC in 2010 for $2.25 billion. A few years later, united by bonhomie, the crew decided to venture back into the same field by starting a new company. Soon they realized that their storage expertise had already gone past its expiration date, and it was time they figure out what exactly needed to be done before they gambled further.
Smart Storage Startup Qumulo Grabs Huge Investment
In November 2012, Qumulo raised $24.5 million Series A round and quickly went quiet until its PR bells starting ringing merrily on February 4, 2015. Godman says, the meditative state was purposeful, since certain decisions on how the company was going to proceed further were to be made. As you know it, before they even began writing codes or tinkering away, they decided to pull their research mode gloves on and talk to as many potential customers as they could.
It was a period of relentless and ostensibly endless research. They were gathering all of their data, writing codes and building a modern storage appliance that will someday in one of their marketing campaign promise to solve all of our storage issues. The Series A money was used in building out the technology.
Qumulo Smart Storage Startup
Qumulo’s mission is quite inspiriting, it aims to be the company that we trust to store, manage and curate our data forever. If you take one look at its website, you’ll see that it is building an extensive software-defined storage platform, the kind that can be applied to all sorts of commodity hardware. Sadly, companies such as Ceph, Cloudian, SwifStack and Scaltiy are already out their vying for customers’ attention with the moderately generic concept.
Although, its smart storage concept is a little interesting once you dig deep into it. It is a cheaper, flexible and smarter alternative to modern day storage services. Smart storage has a certain level of automation that helps intelligently bend itself as per the changing patterns and resource types. The company also promises to change the archetype by managing data, rather than simply managing the storage.
Eventually, Qumulo aims to be an all-software solution in the near future which the $ 40 million cash infusion will help them get going. While it remains in a stealth mode (not talking about its PR reps), it still has its product available since the end of last year and has a few customers.
Sujal Patel, the founder of Isilon recently joined the board. The startup is likely to compete directly with EMC’s network storage offering. For now, let’s just say that a total of $67 million is an impressive amount!
