Kaminario's Latest Funding Round Swells to $68M

Kaminario, a Newton, Mass.-based provider of all-flash data storage systems, has announced that it has raised another $15 million in an "oversubscribed" round of Series E financing that already scored the company $53 million last month.

New backers include Silicon Valley Bank, Lazarus Hedge Fund and an unnamed "large public company." Existing investors, Sequoia Capital, Pitango, Globespan, Tenaya and Mitsui, also participated in the round. To date, the company has raised $143 million.

The additional capital will be used to bolster the Kaminario's sales, marketing and support operations as more of its K2 all-flash midrange arrays find homes in enterprise data centers. In 2015, the company has plans to expand into five new European regions.

"Flash arrays have quickly exploded in the market because they can meet modern business needs in a way legacy solutions cannot," said Haim Sadger, managing partner at Sequoia Capital, in a statement. Referencing the accolades (Gartner Magic Quadrant visionary and Flash Memory Summit award winner) and expanding customer base, he noted that he firm "has moved from early pioneer to a leading player in this burgeoning market."

"We believe that all-flash is the future of storage, and we're committed to developing a comprehensive, top-tier product that supports the broad scope of our customers' requirements," said Kaminario founder and CEO Dani Golan in prepared remarks.

His company is "humbled and invigorated" by its progress, he added, and will continue to lower the barriers to flash storage adoption in enterprise storage area network (SAN) environments. Kaminario's arrays provide usable solid state-drive (SSD) capacity at a cost of $2 per gigabyte (GB), on average.

According to the company, bookings have quadrupled since the release of its fifth-generation K2s last May. Its customer base has grown diverse, reported the company, with interest from the federal government and organizations in the financial services, healthcare, advertising and education industries. Since that time, the company's staff has grown by a rate of 25 percent, quarter-over-quarter, the company reported.

In December, the company added new data-at-rest encryption capabilities that can be enabled non-disruptively, making it tougher for data to leak out of its arrays. "Engineered with 256-bit AES keys technology, K2 protects data by requiring administrative authorization for access and ensures no data is available on drives after deletion through a cryptographic SSD erase feature," explained Kaminario in a statement.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.