SolidFire, a US-based maker of storage systems for cloud providers, has raised $31m in series C financing led by Samsung Ventures, the venture capital division of South Korean conglomerate Samsung, and joined by existing investors, investment firms New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners.
SolidFire has now raised $68m in total funding. Previously, SolidFire raised $25m in October 2011 in its second funding round: New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners, and Novak Biddle participated in the second round and the company also received individual investments from advisors Frank Slootman, former chief executive officer of Data Domain, David Schneider, former VP of Worldwide Sales at Data Domain, and Greg Papadopoulos, former VP and CTO of Sun Microsystems.
The latest funding will support SolidFire’s expansion of sales and marketing resources.
At the same time as announcing its C round of finance, SolidFire unveiled its SF9010 product, which it claims is now the largest and fastest all-SSD storage platform available on the market, and which leverages Samsung’s latest 960GB MLC datacenter-class drives.
Jay Chong, Senior Director at Samsung Ventures, said: “We feel that SolidFire is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the rapid growth in both public and private cloud computing markets. They have demonstrated clear technological leadership with their patent pending QoS capabilities, and true scale-out architecture. And their strong customer traction puts them in the right position as the cloud computing market matures”
Dave Wright, SolidFire founder and chief executive officer, said: “Samsung Ventures’ investment and partnership will have a significant impact on our business. Their worldwide relationships and leadership in flash memory will allow us to expand our reach much further and faster than before.”