Infinidat boxes up $95M funding haul

Infinidat picked up $95 million in funding today to help fuel an aggressive product expansion – including moves into secondary storage and a public cloud offering.

Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing led the funding round, which brings Infinidat’s total funding to $325 million since its 2011 founding. The company also said the C Round haul gives it a $1.6 billion valuation.

The storage array startup founded by EMC Symetrix developer Moshe Yanai claims to have several profitable quarters behind it and 250% year-over-year revenue growth for the second quarter of 2017.

So why take funding money? Infinidat CTO Brian Carmody said the round will push Infinidat towards an initial public offering (IPO).

“When you’re doing well, you get approached by people who want to invest,” Carmody said. “The Goldman Sachs team made a compelling case to Moshe, and the sizeable investment on their part will help us get to an IPO faster. That’s the next big milestone for the company.”

TPG Growth, which led Infinidat’s previous round, also participated in the C funding round.

Carmody said Infinidat has “a few hundred” enterprise customers for its  InfiniBox platform, and most of those customers have over $1 million in deal revenue with the startup.

Carmody said the 500-plus-person company will look to expand its sales team, but it also has an interesting product roadmap. Infinidat claims its use of DRAM for reads and writes makes its hybrid arrays perform better than all-flash competitors, and now is going into other areas than primary on-premises data.

Over the next six months, Carmody said Infinidat will launch products to compete with backup targets such as Dell EMC Data Domain and other appliances that integrate software. Infinidat will also go after Amazon, Microsoft and Google with its Cloud Volumes public cloud play.

“Customers are looking for alternatives to Data Domain, Rubrik, and all that stuff,” Carmody said. “We really want to ramp up our game there with new products in secondary storage.

“The next piece of that is a move into the public cloud space. Lots of customers say they’re moving workloads into the public cloud for elasticity but storage options from Amazon, Azure and Google aren’t all that good.”

If Infinidat is profitable, that puts it in a better position to become a public company than other storage companies that completed IPOs in recent years. Carmody said an initial public offering is “inevitable” for a company the size of Infinidat but is not a high priority.

“That’s not a goal for us,” he said. “It imposes a burden. Now we’re in charge of our own destiny, we can move fast and be super agile. We know it’s the likely the next financial milestone, but we’ll hold off as long as possible.”