Infinidat, a data storage technology startup with offices in Israel and Needham, Mass., on Wednesday announced that it’s achieved a $1.2 billion valuation as part of a new funding round of $150 million.
The company was founded in 2011 and had previously raised an $80 million round that was never announced, a spokeswoman said. I hadn’t heard of them until now, but I’m certainly familiar with their CEO’s previous work—managing the development of EMC’s Symmetrix storage system, which served as the basis for the ascendancy of EMC (NYSE: EMC) in the tech world. Infinidat CEO/founder Moshe Yanai, an Israeli engineer, had joined Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC in 1987 and ultimately became so important there that he at one point earned more than EMC’s CEO, according to a 2001 Forbes article (via that article: a joke at one point had been “that EMC secretly stands for ‘Eventually Moshe’s Company.’”)
Now, however, EMC appears to be among the companies that Yanai and Infinidat are seeking to rival. In a news release, Infinidat doesn’t mention EMC by name, but says that Yanai has “a track record of developing winning storage architectures," and among them are "industry standard storage products that Infinidat challenges.”
Infinidat has stayed stealthy about its products and business until now, the spokeswoman said—though the company has been selling to customers, including some in the Fortune 500.
The company says its InfiniBox storage device delivers an strong combination of attributes for large businesses—with improvements over other systems on capacity, availability and performance, paired with what Infinidat calls “a disruptive price point.” The patented storage technology is also “dramatically simpler” to use, Yanai said in a news release.
According to Tim Millikin of TPG Growth, a growth equity firm that led the new $150 million round:
There are many fast-growing companies that are providing incremental advancements to existing technologies, and then there is a much more rare set of companies that are developing fundamentally new storage architectures for the next generation data center. Infinidat is one of the true innovators in the space that will change the way data is stored in the future.
Previous TPG Growth investments have included Uber, Airbnb, Box, Lynda.com, Lenovo and Seagate Technology.
Infinidat has had offices in Massachusetts since it was founded in 2011, though the company’s staff presence here is small; 20 of its nearly 200 employees are in Massachusetts, split between the Needham office and a development lab in Marlborough, according to the spokeswoman.
Images courtesy of Infinidat.
