US-based computer systems company Virident Systems closed its series C round yesterday, having raised $21m in financing from investors including computing and electronics corporation Cisco, and Intel Capital, the corporate venturing fund for semiconductor manufacturer Intel.
The round was led by Globespan Capital Partners, with participation from fellow venture capital (VC) firms Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures. In total, Virident has now raised $50.4m since it was founded in 2006.
Virident’s series A round raised $13.3m in 2007, with participation from investors including Artiman and flash memory chip maker Spansion. Artiman and Spansion also contributed $3.4m, in February 2010, before Artiman and Globespan funded Virident’s $12.7m series B round in November.
Bryan Wolf, managing director at Intel Capital, said: "The widening performance gap between compute and storage is limiting the ability to cost-effectively scale critical application performance in enterprise and cloud data centres. We are delighted to make this strategic investment in a company that is focused on solving I/O bottlenecks in the data centre, thereby unleashing the full potential of our next generation multi-core processor platforms."
Virident chose the occasion to announce its next product, the Virident FlashMAX, an SCM storage device it claims can access data far faster than hard disk-drive storage systems or competing flash-based storage devices. Virident has pledged to invest the funds in further product innovation and in market expansion.