Igneous Systems CEO Kiran Bhageshpur (Igneous Photo)

Seattle startup Igneous has reeled in a $25 million investment round to fuel growth of its software that helps companies manage their unstructured data.

WestRiver Group led the Series C round, which pushes total funding to date to $70 million. Existing investors including Madrona Venture Group, NEA, Vulcan Capital, and Redpoint Ventures also participated. The investment values the company at around $100 million, according to PitchBook.

Founded in 2013 by veterans of Isilon Systems and NetApp, Igneous’ platform provides visibility and storage for unstructured data, or information that isn’t easily categorized, both in the cloud or on-premise.

The company’s clients span across various industries and include The Allen Institute of Brain Science, OpSec, PAIGE, Tippet Studios, Altius Institute, and Bardell. Igneous has customers in the “mid-double digits,” said CEO and co-founder Kiran Bhageshpur.

“They use Igneous to see, organize, mobilize and protect their unstructured data — and for our customers this is petabytes of mission critical, often machine generated data typically living across disparate systems onsite, offsite and in public cloud,” Bhageshpur said in an email. “Igneous helps data-centric enterprises tap into their valuable unstructured data, optimize their storage and IT resources and reduce their data risk posture.”

(Igneous Photo)

Bhageshpur said Igneous differentiates from competitors with its focus on enabling efficiency at scale and the ability to support any file or object protocol.

“Our customers are able to quickly (in days) get up and running, see all of their data, improve their backup SLAs and modernize their data protection services, surgically archive and migrate data to control tier 1 storage costs, organize their datasets for use in HPC/ML/EDA/RPA workflows … all without the need for a full-time system administrator,” he explained.

The startup employs 70 people and expects to grow headcount by more than 50 percent in 2019. Bhageshpur said new sales growth has increased by 10X over the past year.

Igneous originally sold a hardware data appliance for companies to help manage on-premises storage systems but has since expanded to develop services geared toward cloud computing.

The global big data market size is expected to reach $70 billion by 2022, according to Statista.

Bhageshpur is the former vice president of engineering in the Isilon Storage Division at EMC, having spent five years in senior engineering roles at the company. Another Isilon engineering vet, co-founder Jeff Hughes, is CTO at Igneous. The company’s third co-founder, Byron Rakitzis, was the first employee at NetApp.

Madrona was also an early investor in Isilon, which sold to EMC for $2.25 billion in 2010.

Anthony Bontrager, WestRiver Group managing director, will join the company’s board as a result of the funding.

“Igneous is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to unlock the value of their datasets and simultaneously reduce their risk profile,” he said in a statement. “This is a complex problem that Igneous has tackled with impressive technology services.”

Other recent Seattle-area investments by Kirkland, Wash-based WestRiver Group include Tectonic Audio Labs, Pro.com, Wicket Labs, and Viewpath.

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