Lightbits announced that it has raised $42 million in
growth capital. New investor Atreides Management led the round, alongside J.P.
Morgan, Valor Equity Partners, Eyal Ofer's O.G. Tech, founder and chairman of
Pacific Century Group (PCG) Richard Li, existing investors, and others. With
this financing, the company has raised more than $100 million since its
founding in 2016.
"In today's data-driven market, enterprise and data center
customers are increasingly focused on achieving superior performance,
scalability, and economics. Lightbits has established itself as a clear leader
in disaggregated storage solutions-poised to meet accelerated customer demand
with its cloud-native data platform. We are excited to partner with the
Lightbits team at a critical stage in the company's growth trajectory," said
Gavin Baker, Manager Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Atreides
Management.
The new investment will be used to fuel the growth of the
Lightbits Cloud Data Platform, as the company invests in innovation and
expansion. Founded by the inventors of the NVMe/TCP standard, Lightbits introduced the world to disaggregated,
composable block storage for any cloud: private clouds, public clouds, and edge
clouds. Lightbits works with existing operating systems, networking, and any
hardware-simplifying storage for hybrid multi-cloud implementations on bare
metal, VMware, Kubernetes, or OpenStack environments. The native NMVe/TCP
architecture, coupled with innovative Intelligent Flash Management, solves the
complexity and high-cost problems endemic in data centers today.
"The unprecedented events of the past two years and the impact of
strained supply chains, have organizations thinking differently about their
data infrastructure, rapidly accelerating the adoption of cloud solutions.
There is tremendous pressure on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and IT
Organizations with private clouds to profitably keep pace with growing business
demand while providing fast, resilient, and secure services," said Avigdor
Willenz, Co-Founder and
Chairman of Lightbits Labs. "Lightbits invented NVMe/TCP and has led the way in
defining a cloud-native storage architecture that is simple, agile, and
efficient. Delivering these benefits significantly improves the competitive
advantage of our enterprise customers. This investment and our continued growth
are validation of our strategy, our incredible team, and our mission to lead
the cloud-native data center transformation by delivering scalable and
efficient software-defined storage that is easy to consume."
Lightbits eliminates storage complexities, unlike other NVM Express
over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) implementations that require Fibre Channel or RDMA via
the RoCE protocol, with specialized network interface cards and drivers. It's
simple, flexible, and easy to deploy at scale on ubiquitous TCP/IP networks,
requiring no special hardware, NICs, drivers, or hypervisor on the storage
nodes. Today, Lightbits is used by many Fortune 1000 organizations, including
several of the world's largest financial services companies, e-commerce
providers, webscalers, and CSPs in response to growing business demand for
fast, resilient, and secure cloud services that maximize profitability and
improve margins.
"The demands
of digital transformation, under way at more than 90% of companies, are driving
a need for increased agility, performance, and capacity in storage systems,
which in turn has driven broad deployment of cloud services and NVMe-based
solid-state storage in enterprises," said Eric Burgener, research vice
president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. "Software-defined,
disaggregated enterprise storage solutions like Lightbits provide a great
foundation for cloud service providers that need to provide agile and
performant storage services for their own customers, and the fact that
Lightbits has the most mature NVMe over TCP implementation in the market
further helps their "cost-effective performance" story."