Hammerspace Inc, an enterprise data orchestration startup, announced its first round of institutional investment on Tuesday.
The San Mateo-based company said it raised $56.7 million led by Prosperity7 Ventures, which is the venture branch of Saudi Arabian Oil Co. — a public petroleum and natural gas company. ARK Invest, Pier 88 Hedge Fund, Samsung and other unnamed investors participated in the round. According to a news release, the new funds will go towards supporting technology expansion and expanding Hammerspace's customer service team.
"What we are going through now as a society is the evolution to the next data cycle," David Flynn, Hammerspace’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with the Business Journal. "It's no longer about structured data. It's no longer the old school data warehouses and so forth. With AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), and new forms of analytics, we can now use the total data, the unstructured big data, which is the majority. We can bring that to bear on creating value and staying competitive as a business."
Unstructured data is information that cannot be analyzed by conventional data tools and requires a separate storage environment, according to IBM. These types of data are usually videos and photos or are text heavy, according to Flynn.
Hammerspace’s software allows enterprises to manage multiple data storage environments, including unstructured data, on one system. Typically, storage environments are managed separately, but to access information from one to another, a copy of that data must be made. Companies that use Hammerspace will not have to make those extra data copies, which will make access simpler and faster, according to Flynn.
"The lifecycle of data has fundamentally changed" he said.
According to a report by the International Data Corporation, close to 90% of business data "is likely to be formed of unstructured data by 2025."
Although Hammerspace may not be a household name, it is already working with big name companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Enterprises LP, the National Science Foundation and Royal Caribbean Group.
Hammerspace was founded in 2018 and entirely funded by Flynn and a few angel investors up until now. Flynn said the idea for the company spun off from working on his prior startup Fusion-io Inc., an enterprise storage company that was acquired by SanDisk Corp. in 2014. SanDisk became part of Western Digital Corp. two years later.
"I could have retired. I could have bought an island instead of investing in and building Hammerspace with the money that I made from the previous venture," Flynn said. "I actually did have to go through a little bit of soul searching and decide, 'what do I want to do?' I started in technology as a hobbyist, I taught myself programing. I'm doing this because of a passion for changing the industry in a fundamental way that enables this next data cycle. Every business ultimately is data driven at its heart today."
