Pliops, a US-based provider of data centre technology, has completed a $65m funding round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), a corporate venturing vehicle for chemicals and industrial group Koch Industries.
Data storage technology producer Western Digital, semiconductor technology producers Xilinx, Nvidia and Intel, and telecommunications and internet group SoftBank also invested, the last two through Intel Capital and SoftBank Ventures Asia respectively.
The round was filled out by State of Mind Ventures (SOMV), Viola Ventures, Expon Capital and Sweetwood Capital. The company said its overall funding now stands at $115m since it was founded in 2017.
Pliops has developed a hardware-based storage processor that utilises data structures and algorithms to help data centre operators offload and accelerate data-intensive workloads using less power and computational load.
SoftBank Ventures Asia led the company’s $30m series B round in early 2019, investing with Intel Capital, Western Digital, Xilinx, SOMV and Viola Ventures. It had previously received $10m in series A funding from Intel Capital, SOMV and Viola Ventures in 2017.
Networking technology producer Mellanox Technologies subequently invested an amount likely to be $10m in Pliops in mid-2019, through subsidiary Mellanox Capital. Nvidia closed its purchase of Mellanox in April 2020, acquiring its Pliops stake in the process.
Eli Groner, managing director of KDT, said: “Pliops is effectively reinventing the approach to one of the most critical, data-intensive challenges in a very large, expanding market. The Pliops technology has broad applicability to not only today’s workloads, but the emerging workloads of tomorrow.”
