MayaData, the company behind the leading Container Attached Storage (CAS) solution for Kubernetes called OpenEBS, announced today it will receive a $26 million investment from new and existing investors to further accelerate product development and adoption and improve its ability to deliver global support to enterprises, governments and service providers. The participating firms include AME Cloud Ventures, DataCore Software and Insight Partners, a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software.

MayaData software and services turn Kubernetes itself into a data layer, boosting the productivity of small teams building data centric applications while freeing enterprises from the risks and costs of data and cloud lock-in. The investment validates the momentum MayaData has achieved for OpenEBS.  Weekly downloads as measured by container pulls of OpenEBS increased by more than 500% during 2019. Customers now include companies such as Bloomberg, a recent winner of the CNCF End User Award, chosen by its peers in recognition of major contributions to the cloud native ecosystem.

Insight is participating via DataCore Software, a portfolio company and a leader in software-defined storage, who will also be contributing IP, personnel and additional assets. Insight Partners has made investments in leading container and Kubernetes technologies, including Veeam, Aqua Security, JFrog, Docker, Tigera, Armory, Mirantis and others. With this technology partnership, MayaData will be able to harness DataCore resources that have served the needs of more than 10,000 customers for data storage for business-critical applications. Proven capabilities like continuous data protection, advanced mirroring, and performance optimizations will augment MayaData products.

Evan Powell, co-founder of MayaData and CEO said: "We are very excited to be working with DataCore and Insight Partners to deliver data agility to users worldwide. In addition to further investments in OpenEBS and the broader CNCF ecosystem, this transaction allows us to take a huge leap forward in serving enterprises, service providers and governments worldwide."

"MayaData has become a trusted partner as we have grown our use of Kubernetes for data-centric workloads," said Zach Dunn, CISO and Senior Director of Platform Operations at Optoro, a global leader in reverse logistics. "This investment in technology and expertise gives us more confidence in our decision as we believe it will further develop MayaData's capabilities and leadership in the space."

"We believe containers are the future of modern applications and we see a clear acceleration of adoption of Kubernetes and related technologies by companies of all sizes," said Jeff Horing, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Insight Partners. "Persistent storage with advanced data services are a requirement to move more tier-1 applications to these platforms. This is why we are confident in our investments in this space and that with our and DataCore's support, MayaData's growth strategy will become the storage and data management technology of choice for Kubernetes users."

As part of this investment, MayaData announced that Don Duet, former CIO of Goldman Sachs and Jay Kidd, former CTO of NetApp and Brocade Communications, have joined the company's advisory board that also includes Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake and former CEO of ServiceNow and DataDomain, as well as other technology industry and community leaders.