Igneous Systems, a Seattle-based maker of storage appliances for data centers, has raised a new $15 million financing round, bringing its total funding to $41.7 million. However, the new investment puts a lower overall value on the company than previous rounds did.
The new round included new investors Vulcan Capital and Orca Bay Capital, joining existing investors New Enterprise Associates, Madrona Venture Group, and Redpoint Ventures. Documents obtained by GeekWire indicate that the share price fell during this latest round.
CEO Kiran Bhageshpur declined to comment on a specific valuation. However, given the opportunity to comment, he didn’t deny that this new funding is a down round.
Igneous makes a hardware appliance designed to store massive amounts of unstructured data that it installs and manages inside customers’ data centers, promising better performance and simpler maintenance. There are lots of older companies with reams of infrequently accessed data about their organizations that they don’t want to throw away — or can’t throw away because of regulations — and are tired of managing complicated legacy storage systems.
The company’s product allows administrators to get rid of older network-attached storage devices and save money on hardware and maintenance costs. This appliance can also connect to cloud backup systems like AWS Glacier or Azure Blob, said Steve Pao, chief marketing officer for Igneous.
As companies start to move into the public cloud, or embrace hybrid cloud life, there’s still that old truism about data: it has gravity. This is especially true for archived data that is valuable but not essential to day-to-day operations, and Igneous can give companies a way to modernize their older storage systems.
But as on-premises data center workloads decline over the next five years, it’s not clear how large a market there will be for products like this. Igneous raised $23.6 million in funding from its existing investors in 2014 before launching its first product in 2016.
In addition to the new funding, Igneous announced that former Nicira CEO Stephen Mullaney is joining its board of directors. The company also plans to increase its current headcount of around 50 employees by 50 percent in 2018, mostly in sales and marketing, Bhageshpur said.
(Editor’s note: This post was updated to clarify the structure companies involved in the funding round.)
