Israeli data storage startup WekaIO has raised $31.7 million in a Series C financing round from investors including Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq:MLNX), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Seagate, Western Digital Capital, and Qualcomm. The company, which develops data storage and file management systems for artificial intelligence (AI), has raised $66.7 million to date including the latest financing round.
The company will use the funds to expand its marketing network worldwide and its development offices in Tel Aviv. Headquartered in San Jose, California and with sales offices in North America and Europe, WekaIO has 100 employees, 50 of them in its Israel office. The company aims to hire 50 more people for its Tel Aviv office in the coming year.
WekaIO was founded in 2013 by CEO Liran Zvibel, COO Omri Palmon, and Chief Architect Maor Ben-Dayan. The company develops technology that streamlines data storage within enterprises and the cloud and allows more efficient storage and swift transmission of artificial intelligence applications, machine learning, financial and medical analysis. Weka.IO sells its products to companies in the automotive, and health sectors through server platforms such as Amazon's AWS.
Zvibel said, “This latest round of financing sets the stage for substantial growth and allows us to continue our mission to deliver an enterprise grade HPC storage solution at cloud scale economics. Modern workloads need a modern file system and legacy solutions just can’t keep pace. In under two years since our launch from stealth, we’ve been lauded with industry awards and accolades, been validated in production environments with leading enterprise organizations, and broken records on industry leading benchmark tests beating out some of the world’s largest supercomputers. This additional capital will allow us to increase our presence worldwide and continue to innovate in order to exceed the evolving needs of our customers.”
Nvidia VP business development Jeff Herbst said, “WekaIO has pioneered an impressive modern parallel file system that delivers important capabilities to accelerate AI and workloads at scale-with high throughput, high bandwidth and low latency data access to GPU-based servers.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 14, 2019
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