This article first appeared on the Boston Business Journal, a sister publication of BostInno.
Needham's Kaminario, which provides flash-based storage systems to large businesses holding their data in the cloud, announced Tuesday it has raised $75 million, among the five biggest rounds of investment in Massachusetts in the past year.
Private-equity firm Waterwood led the round. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and Pitango Venture Capital participated, as did new investors like Silicon Valley Bank and Lazarus Capital Partners. Kaminario has now raised $218 million since its founding in 2008.
The money will be used to fuel Kaminario's growth and capitalize on the rapidly increasing amount of data companies are storing in the cloud.
"We are facing day in and day out some of the largest competitors in the world," CEO and founder Dani Golan said in a phone interview, citing companies like Hitachi Data Systems and EMC (NYSE: EMC), recently merged with Dell. "And you want to make sure that we have enough ammunition to go to battle. Certainly this the size of a public round without the hassle [of going public].”
Golan, who used to work at EMC, declined to share revenue figures, but said customers number "in the hundreds" and include international telecommunications firm Telefonica and travel site Priceline (Nasdaq: PLCN). Annual contract size ranges from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions, according to Golan.
Golan said Kaminario's package of flash-based storage hardware and software is most attractive to new software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies or to divisions of legacy companies shifting to a Saas model, because it allows those companies to quickly scale their storage capacity and be flexible in how they access data.
“Think of a lego block," Golan said. "Customers can come into the Kaminario strategy and they can start small and they can build their cloud infrastructure as a lego. They can scale their performance and their capacity with no limitation.”
Kaminaro employs about 275 people worldwide, including 100 in its Needham office, which the Boston Business Journal visited last year.
Golan said he's looking to take Kaminario public one day but is "not in a hurry" while it's still possible to raise such large rounds of private investment.
