Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced plans to expand its venture capital program, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder to help accelerate HPE's edge-to-cloud strategy. Pathfinder expects to significantly ramp its rate of investment over the next year starting with three new investments that solve key customer challenges across edge, cloud, and data.

"Our increased rate of investment will allow us to enhance our engagement with the robust venture-backed ecosystem and better support HPE's vision to be the edge-to-cloud company," said Paul Glaser, Vice President and Head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. "The new portfolio companies will add value for HPE customers by bringing innovative, edge-to-cloud solutions that are evaluated by HPE technologists."

Pathfinder invests in category-leading start-ups, integrates their technologies with the HPE product portfolio, and architects joint go-to-market programs to bring innovative, joint solutions to HPE customers. In addition, Pathfinder closely monitors longer-horizon disruptive innovation, helping encourage technological advancements that keep HPE on the leading edge.

Pathfinder's three recent investments support HPE's vision to be the edge-to-cloud company:

Cellwize is a Radio Access Network (RAN) automation platform that enables telecommunications companies to accelerate 5G network deployment and go-to-market, as well as improve the return on their network investments. The Cellwize solution is well positioned to complement the HPE Communications Technology Group offerings.

vFunction helps companies modernize their legacy applications to run in containerized environments using a lightweight microservices architecture. vFunction will accelerate application modernization initiatives as well as the adoption of cloud native technologies and explore collaboration as part of the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform ecosystem.

SingleStore is a one-stop, single database that unifies data models and data types and offers low-latency, consistent queries and processing for data-intensive workloads across hybrid, on-premises, and cloud environments. HPE will evaluate introducing SingleStore to the HPE Ezmeral Marketplace of software applications for HPE customers and partners to provide a sophisticated modern database with tiered storage spanning RAM, NVMe, SSDs, and cloud object storage.

"Pathfinder is a critical component of HPE's ‘Buy-Build-Partner' innovation strategy and has a strong track record of informing our strategy while delivering top-quartile industry returns," said Hang Tan, SVP and Chief Strategy Officer of HPE. "The strength of the portfolio reflects alignment with our strategy, HPE's market leadership position, and the IT challenges we solve for our customers."