Startup company Volumez, headed by former Intel senior vice president Amir Faintuch, has expanded its Series A fund raising round begun last year by $20 million to $40 million, the company announced today. The first tranche of $20 million funding was led by KDT in April 2023.
Volumez did not disclose its valuation for the purposes of the round, but it is believed that the second tranche involved a $100 million rise in the valuation, which is not especially high, but on the other hand the company is run fairly modestly. It has marked its first year of sales, and is taking its first steps in the data management on public cloud market, in which bigger companies are active: EMC, IBM, Dell, NetApp, and two Israeli companies, VAST Data and Weka.
Faintuch, one of the most senior Israelis ever at Intel, agreed to manage the company, which was founded by Jonathan Amit, a storage and data management engineer with hundreds of patents to his name, after reaching the conclusion that he would be able to disrupt the cloud market not through hardware but through a product combining a new hardware and software architecture that would save costs on the public cloud. Volumez enables companies that use cloud services from companies such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft Azure, to save costs on training models, for example. It does so by cutting the use of controllers - hardware components that accelerate cloud activity - by means of the Linux development community, with open code that facilitates simulation of complex computing memory operations.
Although the young company is at an early stage, Faintuch recruited senior, experienced people to its management: John Blumenthal, former manager of data analytics at HPE is chief product and business officer at the Israeli company; Jason McKinney, who ran the public cloud business at NetApp, is chief revenue officer; and Philippe Ciampossin, formerly a senior manager in cloud engineering at NetApp and Cisco, and an expert in storage and networking, is senior vice president of advanced technology.
Faintuch was one of the highest ranking Israelis at Intel. He joined the giant company in 2014 after a long period as a vice president at Qualcomm, to manage the company’s chip development teams. In 2019, he left Intel for a senior post at GlobalFoundries, where he was believed to have been a party to Intel’s attempts to acquire the company.
New investors in the current round, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), are Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and J-Ventures. They join existing investors Pitango First and Viola Ventures. Koch Disruptive Technologies is believed to be the largest investor so far in the company, which has raised a total of $52 million, including the current tranche, since it was founded.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 10, 2024.
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