Last week, Herzliya and Waltham, Massachusetts-based Infinidat announced it had closed a $95 million Series C financing round, led by Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing with participation from existing investor TPG Growth.
Infinidat specializes in perabytes — a million gigabytes. Perabytes may not be coming to a PC near you in the immediate future, but it’s what large corporations need to store their data in the cloud.
The company’s InfiniBox system, launched in 2014, can hold more than 5 perabytes of data, enough to consolidate a large number of legacy enterprise systems onto a single platform.
The latest round brings the total raised by the company to $325 million. Infinidat is valued at $1.6 billion, making it the latest Israeli “unicorn” – a private startup with a valuation of $1 billion or more (although the company was claiming a billion-dollar valuation two years ago already).
Data-storage requirements are set to explode in the next decade, primarily due to the rise of the Internet of Things (machines communicating with each other), artificial intelligence, and genomic science (the study of the human genome). Analyst firm IDC estimates that the global datasphere will grow from 16 zettabtyes today to 163 zettabytes by 2025. A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes (or a billion gigabytes).
Infinidat has several hundred corporate and institutional customers for its InfiniBox platform, including some of the world’s largest telecoms, banks, cloud-service providers, and healthcare providers. The new funding will help the company expand. The 500-person Infinidat currently has offices in 17 countries.
Instead of relying on expensive flash drives for enterprise storage, Infinidat uses relatively low-cost hardware and machine-learning algorithms. Infinidat says that its storage architecture is “fundamentally different from consumer-centric cloud storage platforms of the last decade and the legacy enterprise storage systems that came before them.”
Infinidat CEO Moshe Yanai spent much of his career at EMC (now Dell EMC) in the United States. He returned to Israel in 2002 to form two startups—XIV and Diligent—both of which he sold to IBM.
(via Israel21c)
[Photo: Israel21c]