Qumulo Closes $24.5 Million in Series A Funding

Qumulo, an enterprise data storage company, announced it has raised $24.5 million in a Series A round of financing led by Highland Capital Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners. Founded in March 2012 with seed funding from Valhalla Partners, Qumulo is solving the manageability, scalability and efficiency problems that plague the $35 billion enterprise data storage market. The company will use the funding for product development and to substantially grow its Seattle-based engineering and leadership teams. As part of the investment, Peter Bell, general partner at Highland Capital Partners, joins the board of directors.

Data growth, application requirements, and technology shifts are disrupting enterprise data storage. End-users double the amount of data they store every two years, creating enormous manageability and efficiency problems for enterprise IT. At the same time, virtualized workloads create random access patterns that place tremendous stress on traditional storage systems. To meet these challenges, application owners and IT operations managers increasingly demand rapid innovation, operational scale, and administrative productivity.

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Qumulo is poised to address these pain points based on its executive team’s deep experience in the enterprise storage market. The company was co-founded by the primary architects of Isilon’s OneFS file system, which revolutionized the way data centers store and manage petabytes of data. Isilon was acquired by EMC in 2010 for $2.25 billion. Qumulo CEO Peter Godman was the former director of software engineering at Isilon and previous CEO of Corensic. He is joined by Qumulo CTO Aaron Passey, former chief architect at Isilon and CTO at Clustrix, and Vice President of Engineering Neal Fachan, previously a distinguished engineer at Isilon and principal engineer at Amazon. Rounding out the Qumulo executive team is Vice President of Product Management Jeff Cobb, who previously served as chief scientist at Wily Technology (now part of CA) and senior vice president strategy at CA.

“A new category of storage is needed to manage the proliferation of data that enterprises face,” said Peter Bell, general partner at Highland Capital Partners. “Data that doubles every two years, a growing scarcity of storage administrators, and the advent of shared, virtualized environments put tremendous pressure on storage systems. Qumulo has the right strategy and team to drive a leadership position in the market.”

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“Based on our previous work with Qumulo’s executive team and their track record of success, we believe the company has the ideal foundation to create the next disruptive storage solution for enterprise IT,” said Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. “We have been closely involved with Isilon Systems and Amazon, two hugely influential companies in the storage space, and believe Qumulo will fuel further innovation in the market.”

“Qumulo’s team of enterprise storage experts is positioned to solve the problems introduced by the confluence of three huge trends in enterprise IT – consumerization, SSD technology, and commoditization,” said Charles Curran, general partner at Valhalla Partners. “The next five years will bring a variety of new approaches to deal with the massive explosion of data and its manageability, and Qumulo will be at the forefront of that revolution.”

“This funding round provides us with expert guidance from storage investors Peter Bell and Matt McIlwain and sets the stage for a rapid growth trajectory,” said Peter Godman, CEO of Qumulo. “The combined insight and collective wisdom of our investors will accelerate our vision for the future of data storage.”

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