Israeli early-stage enterprise storage company E8 Storage has closed a $12 million Series B financing round led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. The investment will help the company to launch its next-generation flash storage with rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud.
E8 Storage’s rack-scale flash architecture has been designed to maximise the performance of its shared, software-defined NVMe solution for high-performance enterprise applications. The solution performs ten times faster than existing all-flash arrays with lower total costs. In live beta tests, E8’s appliance has delivered unprecedented performance (10M IOPS) and latency on par with local NVMe flash (100us/50us of read/write). E8 combines these performance metrics with the benefits of software-based centralised storage, making it an ideal choice for use in high-performance enterprise applications such as real-time market data analytics, hyper-scale data centres and high-performance computing.
The company was founded in 2014 by CEO Zivan Ori and VP R&D Alex Friedman. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California E8 Storage's development center is in Tel Aviv.
Ori said, “Today’s investment brings us closer to launching our software-centric solution, which is currently in beta testing, as the only scale-out solution in the industry. It provides a rich feature set of data services such as high availability, RAID and thin provisioning, and can be easily scaled and upgraded as hardware components improve. The fast-growing interest in E8 Storage proves that the market for shared NVMe solutions is definitely maturing.”
As part of the funding round, Accel’s Kevin Comolli, who led the investment, will be joining E8’s board. Comolli said: “The next generation of high-performance enterprise applications such as big data analytics and IoT data processing require a fundamental rethink of our existing data center architectures. E8 has built a game-changing storage product, and the overwhelming feedback from its beta tests has demonstrated strong product market fit for its rack-scale flash solution. We have been very impressed with the team from the outset and we’re confident in the company’s potential to become a leading player in enterprise storage.”
E8 Storage will use the new funding for accelerating its go-to-market by hiring a sales and marketing team in the US, as well as doubling its R&D team in Israel.