$42 million in growth capital has been raised by Lightbits, a software-defined NVMe data platform for any cloud. As the business invests in innovation and growth, the new investment will be utilized to fuel further growth of the Lightbits Cloud Data Platform.
Along with J.P. Morgan, Valor Equity Partners, Eyal Ofer’s O.G. Tech, Richard Li, founder and chairman of Pacific Century Group (PCG), previous investors, and others, new investor Atreides Management led the new round. Since its start in 2016, the business has raised more than $100 million.
“In today’s data-driven market, enterprise and data center customers are increasingly focused on achieving superior performance, scalability, and economics,” said Gavin Baker, Manager Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Atreides Management. “Lightbits has established itself as a clear leader in disaggregated storage solutions – poised to meet accelerated customer demand with its cloud-native data platform. We are excited to partner with the Lightbits team at a critical stage in the company’s growth trajectory.”
Edge Clouds, Public Clouds
The NVMe/TCP standard’s creators founded Lightbits, which popularized disaggregated, assembleable block storage for all types of clouds, including edge clouds and public clouds. Lightbits simplifies storage for hybrid multi-cloud solutions on bare metal, VMware, Kubernetes, or OpenStack environments by working with existing operating systems, networking, and any hardware. According to Lightbits, the complexity and high-cost issues that are now prevalent in data centers are resolved by the native NVMe/TCP architecture in combination with ground-breaking Intelligent Flash Management.
“The unprecedented events of the past two years and the impact of strained supply chains, have organizations thinking differently about their data infrastructure, rapidly accelerating the adoption of cloud solutions. There is tremendous pressure on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and IT Organizations with private clouds to profitably keep pace with growing business demand while providing fast, resilient, and secure services,” said Avigdor Willenz, Co-Founder and Chairman of Lightbits Labs. “Lightbits invented NVMe/TCP and has led the way in defining a cloud-native storage architecture that is simple, agile, and efficient. Delivering these benefits significantly improves the competitive advantage of our enterprise customers. This investment and our continued growth are validation of our strategy, our incredible team, and our mission to lead the cloud-native data center transformation by delivering scalable and efficient software-defined storage that is easy to consume.”
NVMe-based Solid-State Storage
Unlike previous NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) implementations that demand Fibre Channel or RDMA via the RoCE protocol, with specific network interface cards and drivers, Lightbits removes storage complexity. It requires no extra hardware, NICs, drivers, or hypervisor on the storage nodes and is straightforward, versatile, and simple to install at scale on widely used TCP/IP networks. In response to the growing demand from businesses for quick, dependable, and secure cloud services that increase profitability and boost margins, many Fortune 1000 companies, including many of the largest financial services firms in the world, e-commerce providers, webscalers, and CSPs, now use Lightbits.
“The demands of digital transformation, under way at more than 90% of companies, are driving a need for increased agility, performance, and capacity in storage systems, which in turn has driven broad deployment of cloud services and NVMe-based solid-state storage in enterprises,” said Eric Burgener, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. “Software-defined, disaggregated enterprise storage solutions like Lightbits provide a great foundation for cloud service providers that need to provide agile and performant storage services for their own customers, and the fact that Lightbits has the most mature NVMe over TCP implementation in the market further helps their ‘cost-effective performance’ story.”
