San Diego-based Nirvanix Inc., the only international “cloud” computing network capable of storing petabytes, or one billion quadrillion bytes, of data for its customers, has raised over $25M in a Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures of Menlo Park.
The new funding, which brings the total capital raised for Nirvanix to $70 million, follows a positive first quarter.
“We booked more revenue in Q1 of 2012 than nearly all of 2011,” said Scott Genereux, president and CEO of Nirvanix, whose customers include San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc., NBC Universal Inc. and other large multinational publicly traded companies.
Also participating in the Series C round were current Nirvanix investors, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures, both of which have San Diego offices, and Valhalla Partners and Intel Capital.
Nirvanix, founded in 2007, plans to initiate an IPO in the next two years, according to Steve Zivanic, the company’s vice president of marketing.
The latest investment will be used to expand engineering and sales, he said. In addition to adding a dozen staff to the 50-member team at the company’s University Towne Center headquarters, Zivanic said that Nirvanix plans to increase its data storage sites, or nodes, which now total 10 worldwide, and accelerate the development of new services for customers. San Diego’s nearest node is in Los Angeles.
Early Problem Solving
In Boulder, Colo., Nirvanix will use the Series C round funding to establish a think tank to identify and solve the “next-generation problems that our customers have not yet encountered,” Zivanic said.
Postdisaster recovery of business critical data will be among the problems Nirvanix’s think tank engineers will address, he said. If a tornado or earthquake disrupts a customer’s headquarters, Nirvanix must be able to immediately reconstitute the client’s on-site data storage system by transferring 500 to 600 terabytes, each representing one trillion bytes, of data previously uploaded to the Nirvanix cloud network.
“Also, what if a customer had to quickly upload petabytes of data to its Nirvanix private cloud because the information must be quickly accessed by one of its own clients,” Zivanic said.
Nirvanix will be the first to deal with next-generation problems, Zivanic pointed out, because it is the industry leader in cloud storage of petabytes and exabytes (one million terabytes) of uncoded or non-numeric data. Such unstructured data include books, journals, documents, videos, email messages and Web pages.
“We’re fundamentally different from anything else out there,” Zivanic said. “No other company has the scale of petabyte deployment in their clouds that we have.” He added that the company’s typical customer —“multibillion dollar publicly traded companies with business critical data” — also distinguishes Nirvanix from cloud data storage companies that appeal primarily to consumers, the general public or website developers, he said.
Nonprofit Work
Although most of the company’s customers are commercial, Nirvanix stores 8.5 petabytes of data for the nonprofit University of Southern California Digital Repository. USCs data are comparable to “eight billion 500 page books,” Zivanic said. Another nonprofit customer is National Geographic.
Corporate customers also include Warner Bros., Cerner Corp., IBM and Relativity Media LLC. The customer support systems of both Cisco and VMware Inc. are stored in Nirvanix clouds, according to Zivanic.
Nirvanix’s highly differentiated software IP was developed by the company’s group of engineers in San Diego. The director of engineering at Nirvanix, Gabe Gallagher, designed the first two major versions of the company’s cloud storage network.
The company’s think tank is located in Boulder, Zivanic said, because that area has a relatively large population of network and storage engineering specialists.
In the announcement about the company’s Series C funding, CEO Genereux said, “Over the past year Nirvanix has secured more petabytes under management than the prior three years combined; deployed the largest private clouds in the world; and made significant market advances in the financial services, health care and media and entertainment sectors.”
David Weiden, general partner, Khosla Ventures, said, “We look to bet on fundamental technology shifts that create big markets, and with Nirvanix we see two of these fundamental shifts occurring together: cloud and data.
“The advantages of cloud computing are becoming more clear all the time, and it is inevitable that storage will also move to this architecture,” Weiden added. “Data, particularly unstructured data, is exploding in volume and ways to leverage it. Nirvanix’s momentum with top tier enterprise customers speaks for itself, and we look forward to helping them accelerate their lead.”
Cathy Yarbrough is a freelance writer for the San Diego Business Journal.