Western Digital Capital backs Excelero

Western Digital Capital has made an investment in Excelero, bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million. San Jose, California-based Excelero is a provider of software-defined block storage solutions.

PRESS RELEASE

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, announced that it received strategic investment funds from Western Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC). This investment represents the fourth strategic player to invest in Excelero, including Micron and Qualcomm, and brings the total VC funds invested in Excelero to $35 million. Excelero will use the funds to accelerate its go-to-market activities worldwide.

Separate from the funding, Excelero and Western Digital have begun technical collaboration activities whereby the two firms are offering web-scale storage solutions to some of the world’s largest, most demanding enterprises and service providers. By harnessing Excelero’s award-winning NVMesh® software-defined block storage solution along with Western Digital’s NVMe SSD hardware, the companies are delivering unrivaled storage scalability, performance, and agility.

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“Excelero has developed a software-defined block storage solution designed to redefine storage for web-scale applications. The company is addressing an important and growing challenge associated with traditional architectures and we are pleased to support their efforts,” said Mark Long, president, Western Digital Capital. “Western Digital is committed to providing a variety of options to customers to solve the increasing challenge of managing AI, real-time analytics and other Fast Data applications. Our new OpenFlexTM architecture and products allow for the independent scaling of compute, storage and network resources, with orchestration and management enabled through an open API. We look forward to working with Excelero to integrate and advance our technologies to create even more powerful solutions for customers in data-centric businesses.”

The Western Digital Capital funding follows an extremely strong Q2 2018 for Excelero where revenue growth topped 50% Q/Q and where results represented the fifth consecutive quarter of 50% Q/Q revenue growth or better since the company’s first customer revenue, prior to its March 2017 launch. With numerous web-scale customer deployments across multiple high-growth verticals – media & entertainment, government and Web & Cloud – Excelero is experiencing the rapid adoption that speaks to the appeal of its hardware-agnostic approach.

As more enterprises embrace web-scale architectures, Excelero is delivering the agility, ready scalability and efficiency from which to easily grow their operations.

“Analytics, machine learning, advanced visualization and AI are driving organizations to embrace new scale-out IT architectures, and they can’t do it with traditional storage architectures,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder of Excelero. “We’re honored to receive this strategic funding from Western Digital Capital, and to embark on a technical collaboration with Western Digital. We look forward to accelerating our go-to-market efforts together as we drive innovation in data center technologies.”

About Excelero
Excelero enables enterprises and service providers to design scale-out storage infrastructures leveraging standard servers and high-performance flash storage. Founded in 2014 by a team of storage veterans and inspired by the tech giants’ shared-nothing architectures for web-scale applications, the company has designed a software-defined block storage solution that meets performance and scalability requirements of the largest web-scale and enterprise applications.

With Excelero’s NVMesh, customers can build distributed, high-performance server SAN for mixed application workloads. Customers benefit from the performance of local flash, with the convenience of centralized storage while avoiding proprietary hardware lock-in and reducing the overall storage TCO. The solution has been deployed for hyper-scale Industrial IoT services, machine learning applications and massive-scale simulation visualization.