Violin Memory Snags Cool $50M in New VC Funding

Time to celebrate another Wall Street-type victory for the NAND flash storage array sector.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Violin Memory, which makes new-generation solid-state memory arrays, on April 2 banked a cool $50 million in Series D funding from SAP Ventures.
Violin, CEO’d by industry veteran Don Basile, says this will boost the company’s market value to more than $800 million. Investors include longtime partners Toshiba and Juniper Networks in addition to new investors SAP Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, among others.
“This is a multibillion dollar market opportunity, and the latest funding enables us to accelerate our go-to-market strategy and enhance our data management software portfolio,” Basile said.
The company has been rumored to be nearing an initial public offering (IPO) announcement. Things could be worse for the relatively young Silicon Valley company.
Violin, in describing “the inevitable shift from disk to flash for primary enterprise storage,” said the market is driven by trends such as big data, analytics, mobile 4G, social commerce and virtualization. Well, the shift may or may not be inevitable, but Basile and his company surely have the market drivers in correct focus.
Violin’s flash memory arrays are installed in data centers of companies that include AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Juniper and Hewlett-Packard through its patent-pending flash vRAID secret storage software sauce.
Oh, and Violin was named AlwaysOn’s Company of the Year in 2011; AO founder and CEO Tony Perkins and his network usually know what they’re talking about.