Seattle-based enterprise data storage startup Qumulo today announced the finalization of $40M in Series B funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with additional participation from existing investors Highland Capital, Madrona Venture Group and Valhalla Partners. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and expand Qumulo’s sales and marketing efforts. Still in stealth, Qumulo tackles data management problems specific to storage infrastructures for massive amounts of data. The company aspires to become the “company the world trusts to store, manage, and curate its data forever” as noted in its mission statement. In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Qumulo’s CEO Peter Godman remarked that the condition of possibility for the retention of “data forever” involves the ever depreciating cost of storage-related hardware infrastructures. That said, industry-wide and global cultural expectations to retain data forever create a veritable constellation of problems related to data retrieval and archiving of billions or trillions of files within cost-effective, scalable storage platforms. Today’s funding raise brings the total capital raised by Qumulo to $67M. Sujal Patel, founder of Isilon, the storage vendor acquired by EMC for $2.5 billion, will join Qumulo’s board of directors and complement a leadership team that includes storage experts from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google. As Qumulo emerges from stealth to provide more details of its product offering, the industry should expect dramatic innovation in enterprise-grade scale-out NAS that forthrightly tackles thorny problems related to the curation and organization of massive amounts of data on storage infrastructures designed for big data sets.
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