Pure Storage, a US-based all-flash enterprise storage array company backed by South Korea-based conglomerate Samsung, has raised $150m at a valuation of more than $1bn.
Advised by merchant bank Allen & Co, Pure said: “Joining the Puritan family [those working at Pure] with this round are leading public market investors T Rowe Price, Fidelity, and Tiger Global.
“These are just the sort of investors that Pure would hope to attract to an IPO some undetermined time down the road. We’re equally gratified that our venture investors—Sutter Hill, Greylock, Redpoint, and Index—are adding their endorsement by doing their full pro rata.”
Scott Dietzen, chief executive of Pure and former serial entrepreneur behind WebLogic, Zimbra, and Transarc, in his blog said Pure had raised the money as “it takes more than $100m to build out a global marketing, sales, and support organisation” as well as hire engineers.
He added: “In our industry, technology sea changes combined with disruptive innovation inevitably launch new companies. For storage, the big historical disruptors have been networked storage and file sharing, launching EMC and NetApp, respectively.
“Today’s disrupter is the shift from disk to flash. That transition is forcing the rewrite of the entire storage stack following the “all flash at the price of disk” recipe that Pure originated.
“The good news for Pure is that reproducing our innovations has proved difficult for the storage incumbents—earlier this year, Pure shipped its third generation product while our primary competitors in EMC and NetApp have yet to ship their first generally available releases of XtremIO and FlashRay.
In May, In-Q-Tel (IQT), the corporate venturing style unit of the US government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), invested an undisclosed amount of funding into Pure Storage.
IQT has also entered into a technology development agreement with the company. The agreement will allow Pure Storage to develop its FlashArray technology.
Pure Storage has previously raised $95m in funding, $5m in a series A round in 2009, $20m in a B round in 2010 and $30m in a series C round in 2011 from Samsung and angels, and $40m in its D round in August 2012, which saw involvement from venture capital firms Sutter Hill Ventures, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures.