Nutanix, the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage
building block for virtualizing datacenters without the need for network
storage, today announced $25 million in new funding in a Series B round led by
legendary venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. Existing investors, Lightspeed
Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital, are also participating in this investment
round.
The company is one of the first to be funded from Khosla Ventures new $1.05
billion fund, Khosla Ventures IV. The new fund will further the firm's strategy
to invest in early stage investments in the areas of clean tech, IT, mobile, and
Internet technology.
"When I was at Sun Microsystems, the focus was on decoupling the client and
the server over a physical network. In the 30 years since then, the clock has
turned full circle," said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.
"Virtualization has made it possible to run clients and (storage) servers in the
same hardware. Network storage, as we know it, is ready to be radically
disrupted. Datacenters will be dramatically faster, simpler and greener with
Nutanix." Mr. Khosla speaks further about his interest in the company, on video
at the Nutanix website.
Nutanix is attracting attention from blue chip VC firms in part because its
unconventional virtualization architecture disrupts decades of traditional
network storage dominance in datacenters. Shirish Sathaye, general partner of
Khosla Ventures, and Mark Leslie, former chairman and CEO of Veritas Software
and a Nutanix advisor, will join the Nutanix board of directors.
"It's hard to think of a legacy technology that's more deserving of
disruption than SANs -- they are expensive and inflexible, and they prevent
enterprises from fully realizing their virtualized datacenter potential for
initiatives such as private cloud and desktop virtualization," said Sathaye. "By
taking the SAN out of the equation, Nutanix brings completely fresh thinking to
solving virtualization challenges. They have a tremendous business opportunity
in front of them."
Nutanix's over-subscribed Series B round of funding follows the company's
successful August launch of its flagship product, Nutanix Complete Cluster, a
high-performance hardware and software solution that converges compute and
storage into a single, compact building block for scaling out a virtualized
datacenter. The product's radically simple approach took the market by surprise,
attracting tremendous industry attention and winning Best of VMWorld 2011 (for
desktop virtualization) during its first public appearance. Nutanix is seeing
strong interest in its disruptive solution from mid to large enterprise
customers and plans to use this funding to grow its market presence in domestic
and international markets.
"We made our first investment in Nutanix while they were still developing a
product. The company's trajectory reminds me of my experience in the early days
of Riverbed Technology," said Ravi Mhatre, Nutanix board member and founder of
Lightspeed Ventures. "I see Nutanix poised for the same type of rapid growth,
leveraging a channel-driven business model to capitalize on a huge market
opportunity."
Formerly a member of the boards of VMware and NetApp, Mark Leslie has seen
firsthand the dramatic changes that virtualization has created in the storage
industry over the last decade. "The converged compute and storage architecture
that Nutanix brings to the table has the potential to completely makeover the
face of virtualized datacenters," said Leslie. "They are setting a new standard
for a private cloud that gives IT dramatically reduced cost of ownership with
the simplicity of a compact building block that can rapidly scale out capacity
and performance at the pace that businesses require today."