Hammerspace vacuums $100 million in Series B to gear for IPO
The latest funding round doubles the prior Series A total with new and prior investors in Hammerspace to expand sales and marketing reach, but experts question IPO ambitions.
Hammerspace, a global file system vendor, received $100 million in new investments Wednesday through a Series B funding round.
The funding will support the expansion of more sales hiring and capabilities to grow brand awareness and adoption before an IPO in the next two years, according to David Flynn, co-founder and CEO of Hammerspace.
Hammerspace is building up its profile and position to be acquired.
Roy Illsley Analyst, Omdia
Hammerspace's recent partnership push may be fueling its IPO ambitions, enterprise IT analysts said, but its powerful but highly specific storage platform may hit a wall on adoption sooner than anticipated and make an acquisition a better option.
"Hammerspace is building up its profile and position to be acquired," said Roy Illsley, an analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
Partner or purchase
The Hammerspace Global Data Platform, the vendor's sole software product, creates a parallel file system and unified metadata layer for hybrid cloud deployments across pNFS, NFS, SMB and S3 storage standards on standard storage hardware.
Recent updates, such as support for S3 object storage and the Hyperscale NAS metadata separation, are all part of a broader push for Global Data Platform to support AI workloads by moving data from siloed locations to GPUs.
Despite the product's capabilities, the challenge of marketing and increasing mindshare among customers remains, according to Flynn. The Series B funding should help alleviate this.
"Hammerspace needs to drive the awareness of how our high-performance Data Platform can help enterprises become AI-ready without losing the investments they made on existing storage and networking," he said.
Investors in this Series B round include Altimeter Capital and ARK Invest, a prior investor. Hammerspace conducted a Series A funding round in 2023, collecting $56.7 million in total. The company was founded in 2018 and in 2022 acquired Rozo Systems, which sold scale-out file system technology, for an undisclosed amount.
"We invested Series A [funding into] developing the product and had an acquisition in the past of RozoFS," Flynn said. "This round we have the technology built, hardened and in production across enterprises, hyperscalers and the cloud. We will use [the] Series B to get our technology to a broader set of users."
The existing users for the platform are among some of the largest enterprises like Meta, which uses Hammerspace for its NFS, and media customers like Jellyfish Pictures.
New partnerships to bundle or sell Hammerspace's platform include Hitachi Vantara, an enterprise storage hardware vendor, and Yition.ai, a Chinese infrastructure AI vendor.
These partnerships could help Hammerspace expand further into customer data centers or, more likely, make the company a more attractive purchase to a storage or cloud company, Illsley said.
"They're building up a few partnerships, which could signal [a desire] to grow," Illsley said. "[But] I don't see them being able to play in the space they're trying to play in."
An acquisition by another company within the next few years is more likely than an IPO for Hammerspace, according to Brent Ellis, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Hammerspace's storage technology may enable hybrid cloud connectivity and connections to GPUs, but those storage engineering considerations are already being mapped out in future data center construction and AI application workloads.
Hammerspace storage software competitors include Weka, Vdura and Data Direct Networks. DDN similarly partnered with the social media platform X to provide storage software for an AI data center.
All of these platforms have a very limited customer base, meaning an acquisition might be the lone way forward for Hammerspace despite IPO ambitions, Ellis said.
"It's a very narrow set of [platform] purchasers," he said. "We're headed to a world where AI application [workloads] become a known quantity."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget, covering cloud and data storage.
