Tag Archives: Storage

Wasabi scores $112M Series C on $700M valuation to take on cloud storage hyperscalers

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Taking on Amazon S3 in the cloud storage game would seem to be a fool-hearty proposition, but Wasabi has found a way to build storage cheaply and pass the savings onto customers. Today the Boston-based startup announced a $112 million Series C investment on a $700 million valuation.

Fidelity Management & Research Company led the round with participation from previous investors. It reports that it has now raised $219 million in equity so far, along with additional debe financing, but it takes a lot of money to build a storage business.

CEO David Friend says that business is booming and he needed the money to keep it going. “The business has just been exploding. We achieved a roughly $700 million valuation on this round, so  you can imagine that business is doing well. We’ve tripled in each of the last three years and we’re ahead of plan for this year,” Friend told me.

He says that demand continues to grow and he’s been getting requests internationally. That was one of the primary reasons he went looking for more capital. What’s more, data sovereignty laws require that certain types of sensitive data like financial and healthcare be stored in-country, so the company needs to build more capacity where it’s needed.

He says they have nailed down the process of building storage, typically inside co-location facilities, and during the pandemic they actually became more efficient as they hired a firm to put together the hardware for them onsite. They also put channel partners like managed service providers (MSPs) and value added resellers (VARs) to work by incentivizing them to sell Wasabi to their customers.

With a $50B run rate in reach, can anyone stop AWS?

Wasabi storage starts at $5.99 per terabyte per month. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than Amazon S3, which starts at 0.23 per gigabyte for the first 50 terabytes or $23.00 a terabyte, considerably more than Wasabi’s offering.

But Friend admits that Wasabi still faces headwinds as a startup. No matter how cheap it is, companies want to be sure it’s going to be there for the long haul and a round this size from an investor with the pedigree of Fidelity will give the company more credibility with large enterprise buyers without the same demands of venture capital firms.

“Fidelity to me was the ideal investor. […] They don’t want a board seat. They don’t want to come in and tell us how to run the company. They are obviously looking toward an IPO or something like that, and they are just interested in being an investor in this business because cloud storage is a virtually unlimited market opportunity,” he said.

He sees his company as the typical kind of market irritant. He says that his company has run away from competitors in his part of the market and the hyperscalers are out there not paying attention because his business remains a fraction of theirs for the time being. While an IPO is far off, he took on an institutional investor this early because he believes it’s possible eventually.

“I think this is a big enough market we’re in, and we were lucky to get in at just the right time with the right kind of technology. There’s no doubt in my mind that Wasabi could grow to be a fairly substantial public company doing cloud infrastructure. I think we have a nice niche cut out for ourselves, and I don’t see any reason why we can’t continue to grow,” he said.

Wasabi just landed $68 million to upend cloud storage


By Ron Miller

Amazon S3 Storage Lens gives IT visibility into complex S3 usage

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As your S3 storage requirements grow, it gets harder to understand exactly what you have, and this especially true when it crosses multiple regions. This could have broad implications for administrators, who are forced to build their own solutions to get that missing visibility. AWS changed that this week when it announced a new product called Amazon S3 Storage Lens, a way to understand highly complex S3 storage environments.

The tool provides analytics that help you understand what’s happening across your S3 object storage installations, and to take action when needed. As the company describes the new service in a blog post, “This is the first cloud storage analytics solution to give you organization-wide visibility into object storage, with point-in-time metrics and trend lines as well as actionable recommendations,” the company wrote in the post.

Amazon S3 Storage Lens Console

Image Credits: Amazon

The idea is to present a set of 29 metrics in a dashboard that help you “discover anomalies, identify cost efficiencies and apply data protection best practices,” according to the company. IT administrators can get a view of their storage landscape and can drill down into specific instances when necessary, such as if there is a problem that requires attention. The product comes out of the box with a default dashboard, but admins can also create their own customized dashboards, and even export S3 Lens data to other Amazon tools.

For companies with complex storage requirements, as in thousands or even tens of thousands of S3 storage instances, who have had to kludge together ways to understand what’s happening across the systems, this gives them a single view across it all.

S3 Storage Lens is now available in all AWS regions, according to the company.

Cloud infrastructure revenue grows 33% this quarter to almost $33B


By Ron Miller

Dropbox shifts business product focus to remote work with Spaces update

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In a September interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston talked about how the pandemic had forced the company to rethink what work means, and how his company is shifting with the new requirements of a work-from-home world. Today, the company announced broad changes to Dropbox Spaces, the product introduced last year, to make it a collaboration and project management tool designed with these new requirements in mind.

Dropbox president Timothy Young says that the company has always been about making it easy to access files wherever you happen to be and whatever device you happen to be on, whether that was in a consumer or business context. As the company has built out its business products over the last several years, that involved sharing content internally or externally. Today’s announcement is about helping teams plan and execute around the content you create with a strong project focus.

“Now what we’re basically trying to do is really help distributed teams stay organized, collaborate together and keep moving along, but also do so in a really secure way and support IT, administrators and companies with some features around that as well, while staying true to Dropbox principles,” Young said.

This involves updating Spaces to be a full-fledged project management tool designed with a distributed workforce in mind. Spaces connects to other tools like your calendar, people directory, project management software — and of course files. You can create a project, add people and files, then set up a timeline and assign and track tasks, In addition, you can access meetings directly from Spaces and communicate with team members, who can be inside or outside the company.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says the pandemic forced the company to reevaluate what work means

Houston suggested a product like this could be coming in his September interview when he said:

“Back in March we started thinking about this, and how [the rapid shift to distributed work] just kind of happened. It wasn’t really designed. What if you did design it? How would you design this experience to be really great? And so starting in March we reoriented our whole product road map around distributed work,” he said.

Along these same lines, Young says the company itself plans to continue to be a remote first company even after the pandemic ends, and will continue to build tools to make it easier to collaborate and share information with that personal experience in mind.

Today’s announcement is a step in that direction. Dropbox Spaces has been in private beta, but will be available in public beta starting today. It should be available publicly at the beginning of next year.

Why is Dropbox reinventing itself?


By Ron Miller

Qumulo update adds NvME caching for more efficient use of flash storage

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Qumulo, the Seattle-based data storage startup, announced a bunch of updates today including support for NvME caching, an approach that should enable customers to access faster flash storage at a lower price point.

NvME flash storage development is evolving quickly, driving down the price with higher performance, a win-win situation for large data producers, but it’s still more expensive than traditional drives. Qumulo CEO Bill Richter pointed out that the software still has to take advantage of these changing flash storage dynamics.

To that end, the company claims with its new NvME caching capability, it is giving customers the ability to access faster flash storage for the same price as spinning disks by optimizing the software to more intelligently manage data on its platform and take advantage of the higher performance storage.

Stealthy Seattle Storage Startup Qumulo Snags $40M Investment

The company is also announcing the ability to dynamically scale using the latest technologies such as chips, memory and storage in an automated way. Further, it’s providing automated data encryption at no additional charge and new instant updates, which it says can be implemented without any down time. Finally, it has introduced a new interface to make it easier for customers to move their data from on premises data storage to Amazon S3.

Richter says that the company’s mission has always been about creating, managing and consuming massive amounts of file-based data. As the pandemic has taken hold, more companies are moving their data and applications to the cloud.

“The major secular trends that underpin Qumulo’s mission — the massive amount of file-based content, and the use of cloud computing to solve the content challenge, have both accelerated during the pandemic and we have received really clear signs of that,” he said.

Qumulo was founded back in 2012 and has raised $351 million. Its most recent raise was a hefty $125 million last July on a valuation over $1.2 billion.

Qumulo scores $125M Series E on $1.2B valuation as storage biz accelerates


By Ron Miller

Dropbox begins shift to high efficiency Western Digital Shingled Magnetic Recording disks

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Last year, Dropbox talked about making a shift to Shingled Magnetic Recording or SMR disks for short because of the efficiency they can give a high volume storage platform like theirs. Today, Western Digital announced that Dropbox was one of the first companies to qualify their Ultrastar® DC HC650 20TB, host-managed SMR hard disks.

Dropbox’s modern infrastructure story goes back to 2017 when it decided to shift most of its business from being hosted on AWS to building their own infrastructure. As they moved through the process of making that transition in the following years, they were looking for new storage technology ideas to help drive down the cost of running their own massive storage system.

As principal engineer James Cowling told TechCrunch last year, one of the ideas that emerged was using SMR:

What emerged was SMR, which has high storage density and a lower price point. Moving to SMR gave Dropbox the ability to do more with less, increasing efficiency and lowering overall costs — an essential step for a company trying to do this on its own. “It required expertise obviously, but it was also exciting to bring a lot of efficiencies in terms of cost and storage efficiency, while pulling down boundaries between software and hardware,” Cowling said.

Three years after moving off AWS, Dropbox infrastructure continues to evolve

As it turns out, Dropbox VP of engineering Andrew Fong says that the company has been working with Western Digital for a number of years and the new SMR technology is the latest step in that partnership.

Western Digital says that these drives deliver this cost savings through increased storage density and lower power requirements. “When considering exabyte-scale needs, and associated capital and operating cost of the data center, the long-term value in terms of lower cost-per-TB, higher density, low power and high reliability can help benefit the bottom line,” the company said in a statement.

Time will tell if these disks deliver as promised, but they certainly show a lot of potential for a high volume user like Dropbox.

Why Dropbox decided to drop AWS and build its own infrastructure and network


By Ron Miller

Egnyte introduces new features to help deal with security/governance during pandemic

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The pandemic has put stress on companies dealing with a workforce that is mostly — and sometimes suddenly — working from home. That has led to rising needs for security and governance tooling, something that Egnyte is looking to meet with new features aimed at helping companies cope with file management during the pandemic.

Egnyte is an enterprise file storage and sharing (EFSS) company, though it has added security services and other tools over the years.

“It’s no surprise that there’s been a rapid shift to remote work, which has I believe led to mass adoption of multiple applications running on multiple clouds, and tied to that has been a nonlinear reaction of exponential growth in data security and governance concerns,” Vineet Jain, co-founder and CEO at Egnyte, explained.

There’s a lot of data at stake.

Egnyte’s announcements today are in part a reaction to the changes that COVID has brought, a mix of net-new features and capabilities that were on its road map, but accelerated to meet the needs of the changing technology landscape.

Egnyte hauls in $75M investment led by Goldman Sachs

What’s new?

The company is introducing a new feature called Smart Cache to make sure that content (wherever it lives) that an individual user accesses most will be ready whenever they need it.

“Smart Cache uses machine learning to predict the content most likely to be accessed at any given site, so administrators don’t have to anticipate usage patterns. The elegance of the solution lies in that it is invisible to the end users,” Jain said. The end result of this capability could be lower storage and bandwidth costs, because the system can make this content available in an automated way only when it’s needed.

Another new feature is email scanning and governance. As Jain points out, email is often a company’s largest data store, but it’s also a conduit for phishing attacks and malware. So Egnyte is introducing an email governance tool that keeps an eye on this content, scanning it for known malware and ransomware and blocking files from being put into distribution when it identifies something that could be harmful.

As companies move more files around it’s important that security and governance policies travel with the document, so that policies can be enforced on the file wherever it goes. This was true before COVID-19, but has only become more true as more folks work from home.

Finally, Egnyte is using machine learning for auto-classification of documents to apply policies to documents without humans having to touch them. By identifying the document type automatically, whether it has personally identifying information or it’s a budget or planning document, Egnyte can help customers auto-classify and apply policies about viewing and sharing to protect sensitive materials.

Egnyte is reacting to the market needs as it makes changes to the platform. While the pandemic has pushed this along, these are features that companies with documents spread out across various locations can benefit from regardless of the times.

The company is over $100 million ARR today, and grew 22% in the first half of 2020. Whether the company can accelerate that growth rate in H2 2020 is not yet clear. Regardless, Egnyte is a budding IPO candidate for 2021 if market conditions hold.

Egnyte unifies its security and productivity tooling into single platform


By Ron Miller

Pure Storage acquires data service platform Portworx for $370M

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Pure Storage, the public enterprise data storage company, today announced that it has acquired Portworx, a well-funded startup that provides a cloud-native storage and data-management platform based on Kubernetes, for $370 million in cash. This marks Pure Storage’s largest acquisition to date and shows how important this market for multi-cloud data services has become.

Current Portworx enterprise customers include the likes of Carrefour, Comcast, GE Digital, Kroger, Lufthansa, and T-Mobile. At the core of the service is its ability to help users migrate their data and create backups. It creates a storage layer that allows developers to then access that data, no matter where it resides.

Pure Storage will use Portworx’s technology to expand its hybrid and multi-cloud services and provide Kubernetes -based data services across clouds.

Image Credits: Portworx

“I’m tremendously proud of what we’ve built at Portworx: an unparalleled data services platform for customers running mission-critical applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Portworx CEO Murli Thirumale. “The traction and growth we see in our business daily shows that containers and Kubernetes are fundamental to the next-generation application architecture and thus competitiveness. We are excited for the accelerated growth and customer impact we will be able to achieve as a part of Pure.”

When the company raised its Series C round last year, Thirumale told me that Portworx had expanded its customer base by over 100 percent and its bookings increased by 376 from 2018 to 2019.

“As forward-thinking enterprises adopt cloud native strategies to advance their business, we are thrilled to have the Portworx team and their groundbreaking technology joining us at Pure to expand our success in delivering multi-cloud data services for Kubernetes,” said Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO of Pure Storage. “This acquisition marks a significant milestone in expanding our Modern Data Experience to cover traditional and cloud native applications alike.”

Portworx raises $27M Series C for its cloud-native data management platform


By Frederic Lardinois

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says the pandemic forced the company to reevaluate what work means

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Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston, appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt today, said that COVID has accelerated a shift to distributed work that we have been talking about for some time, and these new ways of working will not simply go away when the pandemic is over.

“When you think more broadly about the effects of the shift to distributed work, it will be felt well beyond when we go back to the office. So we’ve gone through a one way door. This is maybe one of the biggest changes to knowledge work since that term was invented in 1959,” Houston told TechCrunch Editor-In-Chief Matthew Panzarino.

That change has prompted Dropbox to completely rethink the product set over the last six months, as the company has watched the way people work change in such a dramatic way. He said even though Dropbox is a cloud service, no SaaS tool in his view was purpose-built for this new way of working and we have to reevaluate what work means in this new context.

“Back in March we started thinking about this, and how [the rapid shift to distributed work] just kind of happened. It wasn’t really designed. What if you did design it? How would you design this experience to be really great? And so starting in March we reoriented our whole product roadmap around distributed work,” he said.

He also broadly hinted that the fruits of that redesign are coming down the pike. “We’ll have a lot more to share about our upcoming launches in the future,” he said.

Houston said that his company has adjusted well to working from home, but when they had to shut down the office, he was in the same boat as every other CEO when it came to running his company during a pandemic. Nobody had a blueprint on what to do.

“When it first happened, I mean there’s no playbook for running a company during a global pandemic so you have to start with making sure you’re taking care of your customers, taking care of your employees, I mean there’s so many people whose lives have been turned upside down in so many ways,” he said.

But as he checked in on the customers, he saw them asking for new workflows and ways of working, and he recognized there could be an opportunity to design tools to meet these needs.

“I mean this transition was about as abrupt and dramatic and unplanned as you can possibly imagine, and being able to kind of shape it and be intentional is a huge opportunity,” Houston said.

Why Dropbox shares are soaring after it reported earnings

Houston debuted Dropbox in 2008 at the precursor to TechCrunch Disrupt, then called the TechCrunch 50. He mentioned that the Wi-Fi went out during his demo, proving the hazards of live demos, but offered words of encouragement to this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participants.

Although his is a public company on a $1.8 billion run rate, he went through all the stages of a startup, getting funding and eventually going public, and even today as a mature public company, Dropbox still evolving and changing as it adapts to changing requirements in the marketplace.


By Ron Miller

Qumulo scores $125M Series E on $1.2B valuation as storage biz accelerates

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Qumulo, a Seattle storage startup helping companies store vast amounts of data, announced a $125 million Series E investment today on a $1.2 billion valuation.

BlackRock led the round with help from Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Kleiner Perkins and new investor Amity Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $351 million.

CEO Bill Richter says the valuation is more than 2x its most recent round, a $93 million Series D in 2018. While the valuation puts his company in the unicorn club, he says that it’s more important than simple bragging rights. “It puts us in the category of raising at a billion plus dollar level during a very complicated environment in the world. Actually, that’s probably the more meaningful news,” he told TechCrunch.

It typically hasn’t been easy raising money during the pandemic, but Richter reports the company started getting inbound interest in March just before things started shutting down nationally. What’s more, as the company’s quarter closed at the end of April, they had grown almost 100% year over year, and beaten their pre-COVID revenue estimate. He says they saw that as a signal to take additional investment.

“When you’re putting up nearly 100% year over year growth in an environment like this, I think it really draws a lot of attention in a positive way,” he said. And that attention came in the form a huge round that closed this week.

What’s driving that growth is that the amount of unstructured data, which plays to the company’s storage strength, is accelerating during the pandemic as companies move more of their activities online. He says that when you combine that with a shift to the public cloud, he believes that Qumulo is well positioned.

Today the company has 400 customers and over 300 employees with plans to add another 100 more before year’s end. As he adds those employees, he says that part of the the company’s core principles includes building a diverse workforce. “We took the time as an organization to write out a detailed set of hiring practices that are designed to root out bias in the process,” he said.

One of the keys to that is looking at a broad set of candidates, not just the ones you’ve known from previous jobs. “The reason for that is that when you force people to go through hiring practices, you open up the position to a broader, more diverse set of candidates and you stop the cycle of continuously creating what I call ‘club memberships’, where if you were a member of the club before you’re a member in the future,” he says.

The company has been around since 2012 and spent the first couple of years conducting market research before building its first product. In 2014 it released a storage appliance, but over time it has shifted more towards hybrid solutions.

Stealthy Seattle Storage Startup Qumulo Snags $40M Investment


By Ron Miller

NetApp to acquire Spot (formerly Spotinst) to gain cloud infrastructure management tools

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When Spotinst rebranded to Spot in March, it seemed big changes were afoot for the startup, which originally helped companies find and manage cheap infrastructure known as spot instances (hence its original name). We had no idea how big at the time. Today, NetApp announced plans to acquire the startup.

The companies did not share the price, but Israeli publication, CTECH, pegged the deal at $450 million. NetApp would not confirm that price.

It may seem like a strange pairing, a storage company and a startup that helps companies find bargain infrastructure and monitor cloud costs, but NetApp sees the acquisition as a way for its customers to bridge storage and infrastructure requirements.

“The combination of NetApp’s leading shared storage platform for block, file and object and Spot’s compute platform will deliver a leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy,” Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager for public cloud services at NetApp said in a statement.

Spotinst, excess cloud capacity management service, snares $35M Series B

Spot helps companies do a couple of things. First of all it manages spot and reserved instances for customers in the cloud. Spot instances in particular, are extremely cheap because they represent unused capacity at the cloud provider. The catch is that the vendor can take the resources back when they need them, and Spot helps safely move workloads around these requirements.

Reserved instances are cloud infrastructure you buy in advance for a discounted price. The cloud vendor gives a break on pricing, knowing that it can count on the customer to use a certain amount of infrastructure resources.

At the time it rebranded, the company also had gotten into monitoring cloud spending and usage across clouds. Amiram Shachar, co-founder and CEO at Spot told TechCrunch in March, “With this new product we’re providing a more holistic platform that lets customers see all of their cloud spending in one place — all of their usage, all of their costs, what they are spending and doing across multiple clouds — and then what they can actually do [to deploy resources more efficiently],” he said at the time.

Shachar writing in a blog post today announcing the deal indicated the company will continue to support its products as part of the NetApp family, and as startup CEOs typically say at a time like this, move much faster as part of a large organization.

“Spot will continue to offer and fully support our products, both now and as part of NetApp when the transaction closes. In fact, joining forces with NetApp will bring additional resources to Spot that you’ll see in our ability to deliver our roadmap and new innovation even faster and more broadly,” he wrote in the post.

NetApp has been quite acquisitive this year. It acquired Talon Storage in early March and CloudJumper at the end of April. This represents the 20th acquisition overall for the company, according to Crunchbase data.

Spot was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv. It raised over $52 million, according to Crunchbase data. The deal is expected to close later this year, assuming it passes typical regulatory hurdles.

Spotinst rebrands as Spot and announces new cloud spend dashboard


By Ron Miller

Wasabi announces $30M in debt financing as cloud storage business continues to grow

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We may be in the thick of a pandemic with all of the economic fallout that comes from that, but certain aspects of technology don’t change no matter the external factors. Storage is one of them. In fact, we are generating more digital stuff than ever, and Wasabi, a Boston-based startup that has figured out a way to drive down the cost of cloud storage is benefiting from that.

Today it announced a $30 million debt financing round led led by Forestay Capital, the technology innovation arm of Waypoint Capital with help from previous investors. As with the previous round, Wasabi is going with home office investors, rather than traditional venture capital firms. Today’s round brings the total raised to $110 million, according to the company.

Founder and CEO David Friend says the company needs the funds to keep up with the rapid growth. “We’ve got about 15,000 customers today, hundreds of petabytes of storage, 2500 channel partners, 250 technology partners — so we’ve been busy,” he said.

He says that revenue continues to grow in spite of the impact of COVID-19 on other parts of the economy. “Revenue grew 5x last year. It’ll probably grow 3.5x this year. We haven’t seen any real slowdown from the Coronavirus. Quarter over quarter growth will be in excess of 40% — this quarter over Q1 — so it’s just continuing on a torrid pace,” he said.

He said the money will be used mostly to continue to expand its growing infrastructure requirements. The more they store, the more data centers they need and that takes money. He is going the debt route because his products are backed by a tangible asset, the infrastructure used to store all the data in the Wasabi system. And it turns out that debt financing is a lot cheaper in terms of payback than equity terms.

“Our biggest need is to build more infrastructure, because we are constantly buying equipment. We have to pay for it even before it fills up with customer data, so we’re raising another debt round now,” Friend said. He added, “Part of what we’re doing is just strengthening our balance sheet to give us access to more inexpensive debt to finance the building of the infrastructure.”

The challenge for a company like Wasabi, which is looking to capture a large chunk of the growing cloud storage market is the infrastructure piece. It needs to keep building more to meet increasing demand, while keeping costs down, which remains its primary value proposition with customers.

The money will help the company expand into new markets as many countries have data sovereignty laws that require data to be stored in-country. That requires more money and that’s the thinking behind this round.

The company launched in 2015. It previously raised $68 million in 2018.

Wasabi just landed $68 million to upend cloud storage


By Ron Miller

VAST Data lands $100M Series C on $1.2B valuation to turn storage on its head

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VAST Data, a startup that has come up with a cost-effective way to deliver flash storage, announced a $100 million Series C investment today on a $1.2 billion valuation, both unusually big numbers for an enterprise startup in Series C territory.

Next47, the investment arm of Siemens, led the round with participation from existing investors 83North, Commonfund Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners, Mellanox Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $180 million.

That’s a lot of cash any time, but especially in the middle of a pandemic. Investors believe that VAST is solving a difficult problem around scaled storage. It’s one where customers tend to deal with petabytes of data and storage price tags beginning at a million dollars, says company founder and CEO Renen Hallak.

As Hallak points out, traditional storage is delivered in tiers with fast, high-cost flash storage at the top of the pyramid all the way down to low-cost archival storage at the bottom. He sees this approach as flawed, especially for modern applications driven by analytics and machine learning that rely on lots of data being at the ready.

VAST built a system they believe addresses these issues around the way storage has traditionally been delivered.”We build a single system. This as fast or faster than your tier one, all-flash system today and as cost effective, or more so, than your lowest tier five hard drives. We do this at scale with the resilience of the entire [traditional storage] pyramid. We make it very, very easy to use, while breaking historical storage trade-offs to enable this next generation of applications,” Hallak told TechCrunch.

The company, which was founded in 2016 and came to market with its first solution in 2018, does this by taking advantage of some modern tools like Intel 3D XPoint technology, a kind of modern non-volatile memory along with consumer-grade QLT flash, NVMe over Fabrics protocol and containerization.

“This new architecture, coupled with a lot of algorithmic work in software and types of metadata structures that we’ve developed on top of it, allows us to break those trade-offs and allows us to make much more efficient use of media, and also allows us to move beyond scalability limits, resiliency limits and problems that other systems have in terms of usability and maintainability,” he said.

They have a large average deal size; as a result, the company can keep its cost of sales and marketing to revenue ratio low. They intend to use the money to grow quickly, which is saying something in the current economic climate.

But Hallak sees vast opportunity for the kinds of companies with large amounts of data who need this kind of solution, and even though the cost is high, he says ultimately switching to VAST should save companies money, something they are always looking to do at this kind of scale, but even more so right now.

You don’t often see a unicorn valuation at Series C, especially right now, but Hallak doesn’t shy away from it at all. “I think it’s an indication of the trust that our investors put in our growth and our success. I think it’s also an indication of our very fast growth in our first year [with a product on the market], and the unprecedented adoption is an indication of the product-market fit that we have, and also of our market efficiency,” he said.

They count The National Institute of Health, General Dynamics and Zebra as customers.


By Ron Miller

Storj brings low-cost decentralized cloud storage to the enterprise

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Storj, a startup that developed a low-cost, decentralized cloud storage solution, announced a new version today called Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service.

The new service comes with an enterprise service level agreement (SLA) that promises 99.9999999% file durability and over 99.95 percent availability, which it claims is on par with Amazon S3.

The company has come up with an unusual system to store files safely, taking advantage of excess storage capacity around the world. They are effectively doing with storage what Airbnb does with an extra bedroom, enabling people and organizations to sell that excess capacity to make extra money.

It’s fair to ask if that wouldn’t be a dangerous way to store files, but Storj Executive Chairman Ben Golub says that they have come up with a way of distributing the data across drives on their network so that no single file would ever be fully exposed.

“What we do in order to make this work is, first, before any data is uploaded, our customers encrypt the data, and they hold the keys so nobody else can decrypt the data. And then every part of a file is split into 80 pieces, of which any 30 can be used to reconstitute it. And each of those 80 pieces goes to a different drive on the network,” Golub explained.

That means even if a hacker were able to somehow get at one encrypted piece of the puzzle, he or she would need 29 others, and the encryption keys, to put the file back together again. “All a storage node operator sees is gibberish, and they only see a portion of the file. So if a bad person wanted to get your file, they would have to compromise something like 30 different networks in order to get [a single file], and even if they did that they would only have gibberish unless you also lost your encryption keys,” he said.

The ability to buy excess capacity allows Storj to offer storage at much lower prices than typical cloud storage. Golub says his company’s list prices are one-half to one-third cheaper than Amazon S3 storage and it’s S3-compatible.

The company launched in 2014 and has 20,000 users on 100,000 distributed nodes today, but this is the first time it has launched an enterprise version of the cloud storage solution.


By Ron Miller

Dell spent $67B buying EMC — more than 3 years later, was it worth the debt?

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Dell’s 2015 decision to buy EMC for $67 billion remains the largest pure tech deal in history, but a transaction of such magnitude created a mountain of debt for the Texas-based company and its primary backer, Silver Lake.

Dell would eventually take on close to $50 billion in debt. Years later, where are they in terms of paying that back, and has the deal paid for itself?

When EMC put itself up for sale, it was under pressure from activist investors Elliott Management to break up the company. In particular, Elliott reportedly wanted the company to sell one of its most valuable parts, VMware, which it believed would help boost EMC’s share price. (Elliott is currently turning the screws on Twitter and SoftBank.)

Whatever the reason, once the company went up for sale, Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake came ‘a callin with an offer EMC CEO Joe Tucci couldn’t refuse. The arrangement represented great returns for his shareholders, and Tucci got to exit on his terms, telling Elliott to take a hike (even if it was Elliott that got the ball rolling in the first place).

Dell eventually took itself public again in late 2018, probably to help raise some of the money it needed to pay off its debts. We are more than three years past the point where the Dell-EMC deal closed, so we decided to take a look back and see if Dell was wise to take on such debt or not.

Dell votes to buy back VMware tracking stock and go public again

What it got with EMC


By Ron Miller

Egnyte unifies its security and productivity tooling into single platform

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Egnyte announced today it was combining its two main products — Egnyte Protect and Egnyte Connect — into a single platform to help customers manage, govern and secure the data from a single set of tools.

Egynte co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain says that this new single platform approach is being driven chiefly by the sheer volume of data they are seeing from customers, especially as they shift from on-prem to the cloud.

“The underlying pervasive theme is that there’s a rapid acceleration of data going to the cloud and we’ve seen that in our customers,” Jain told TechCrunch. He says that long-time customers have been shifting from terabytes to petabytes of data, while new customers are starting out with a few hundred terabytes instead of five or ten.

As this has happened, he says customers are asking for a way to deal with this data glut with a single platform because the volume of data makes it too much to handle with separate tools. “Instead of looking at this as separate problems, customers are saying they want a solution that helps address the productivity part at the same time as the security part. That’s because there is more data in the cloud, and concerns around data security and privacy, along with increasing compliance requirements, are driving the need to have it in one unified platform,” he explained.

The company is doing this because managing the data needs to be tied to security and governance policies. “They are not ultimately separate ideas,” Jain says.

Jain says up until recently, the company saw the data management piece as the way into a customer, and after they had that locked down, they would move to layer on security and compliance as a value-add. Today, partly due to the data glut and partly due to compliance regulations, Jain says, these are no longer separate ideas, and his company has evolved its approach to meet the changing requirements of customers.

Egnyte was founded in 2007 and has raised over $138 million on a $460 million post valuation, according to Pitchbook data. Its most recent round was $75 million led by Goldman Sachs in September, 2018. Egnyte passed the $100 million ARR mark in November.

Egnyte hauls in $75M investment led by Goldman Sachs


By Ron Miller