Startup raises $60 million to grow Datrium DVX business

Datrium’s latest $60 million funding will fuel its hybrid cloud computing and data management product line and business expansion into Europe.

The Series D funding round boosted the Sunnyvale, California-based startup’s overall total to $170 million since 2012. New CEO Tim Page closed the round as he tries to pivot the company from its SMB and midmarket roots to enterprise sales of Datrium DVX.

Former CEO Brian Biles, a Datrium founder who is now chief product officer, said the startup is having a great quarter, and Page has “re-energized a lot of our focus on go-to-market.” Page’s experience includes building out an enterprise sales organization while COO at VCE, the VMware-Cisco-EMC joint venture that produced Vblock converged infrastructure systems.

Datrium DVX first hit the market in early 2016 with server-based flash cache to accelerate data reads and separate data nodes for back end storage. DVX software orchestrates and manages data placement between the Datrium Compute Nodes and Data Nodes and provides storage features such as inline deduplication, compression, snapshots, replication, and encryption.

Separate Compute and Data Nodes
Datrium now pitches its on-premises DVX as converging “tier 1 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) with scale-out backup and cloud disaster recovery (DR).” But Datrium DVX is not HCI in the classic sense with virtualization, compute, and storage in the same box. The Datrium DVX system’s Compute Nodes cache active data on the front end, and separate Data Nodes store information on the back end, enabling customers to scale performance and capacity independently.

Customers have the option to buy Datrium Compute Nodes, supply their own servers, or use a combination of the two, so long as they’re equipped with solid-state drives (SSDs) to cache data. The compute nodes support VMware, Red Hat and CentOS virtual machines. Disk- or flash-based Datrium Data Node appliances handle the backend storage.

This year, Datrium added a software-as-a-service Cloud DVX option to back up data in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and CloudShift software for disaster recovery orchestration. The company claimed that more than 30% of its new customers adopted Cloud DVX within the first three months of its availability. Biles said Cloud DVX could lower backup costs in AWS because Datrium globally deduplicates data.

Biles characterized Datrium’s Series D funding as a “standard round” that will help to grow all parts of the company. He said Datrium currently operates in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in Canada and Japan, and the company plans to expand to Europe next year. Datrium has more than 150 employees and more than 200 customers, according to company sources.

“We have good momentum now, but we want to keep feeding that,” Biles said. He offered no estimate on when the company might become cash-flow positive. “A lot depends on the next couple of years of sales acceleration.”

Samsung Catalyst Fund led the latest funding round, with additional backing from Icon Ventures and prior investors NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Icon’s Michael Mullany, a former VP of marketing and products at VMware, joined Datrium’s board of directors.