Voltaire, which provides InfiniBand solutions, announced today that it had secured $15 million in financing. This brings the company’s total funding to date to $50 million. Baker Capital, Pitango Venture Capital and new investor Vertex Venture Capital led the round. Existing investors PNV, Tamir Fishman Ventures, and The Challenge Fund also participated.
“The InfiniBand market has advanced significantly over the past year with support from leading vendors such as IBM, Oracle, SUN, HP, SGI and Apple, and, more importantly, from customers in the high performance computing and enterprise data center markets," said Baker Capital partner Ashley Leeds. "The strong endorsements from Voltaire's prestigious customers and the quality of the company's management team were key factors in our decision to invest in this round.”
Voltaire provides intelligent InfiniBand hardware and software solutions that enable high performance applications to run on distributed server, storage and network resources. Voltaire’s customers include Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Mississippi State University, and Ohio Supercomputer Center.
Voltaire opened additional sales and marketing offices in Europe and Asia Pacific last year.
Vertex said that the InfiniBand market demonstrated tangible growth in 2003 with customers deploying the technology to improve the performance and manageability of Linux server clusters and grids. Quoting a recent study by IDC, Vertex said the market for InfiniBand products in the high performance computing and enterprise data center markets was expected to surpass $750 million in 2006.
“The quality of our investors and the speed with which we closed this round sends a clear message to the market that InfiniBand represents a sizable opportunity and that Voltaire is well-positioned to be a market leader,” said Ronnie Kenneth, chairman and CEO, Voltaire. “We intend to use this new financing to rapidly grow sales, marketing and customer support initiatives to generate further demand for our products and solutions, and expect this round to carry us to breakeven.”
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on March 8, 2004