Intelligent Storage Startup Qumulo Raises $30M More

April 04, 2017, 07:30 AM EDT

Scale-out storage technology developer Qumulo on Tuesday unveiled it has raised $30 million in new funding to help expand the company's geographic reach and its sales representation.

The new funding brings the Seattle-based storage startup to over $130 million raised to date, and it comes as the company is showing strong momentum, said CEO Bill Richter.

"We're focused on investing in our growth," Richter said. Qumulo isn't yet profitable, but the CEO said it has a "substantial" number of installations and saw the number of petabytes of its storage installed grow by 425 percent between 2015 and 2016.

Qumulo was formed in 2012 by key veterans of Dell EMC's Isilon scale-out NAS business. In 2015, it announced a scalable NAS offering with an integrated database that provides the ability for an enterprise to answer any questions about what is stored, without needing to scan the data for metadata that must be stored and managed separately.

Qumulo's technology is 100-percent software-defined, and currently runs on hardware supplied by the company or on HPE's Apollo appliances, Richter said. HPE and Qumulo both sell the combined solution. Over time, the company plans to expand the number of x86-based hardware appliances with which the software is certified, he said.

The technology is built for modern scaling requirements with the ability to manage billions of large and small files in a single file system, he said. It includes data awareness via data analytics built into the file system, he said.

The new funding boost shows Qumulo to be a very healthy storage partner, said Sandy Nasseri, founder and CEO at MelroseMAC, a Hollywood, Calif.-based solution provider and Qumulo channel partner focused heavily on the media and entertainment market.

Qumulo, whose storage MelroseMAC has installed in such companies as Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers, and Fox, is unique in that all its support is done in the U.S., Nasseri told CRN.

"That's important for us," she said. "We run 24-by-7. We've actually used Qumulo's support at 10:30 p.m. And you know, that was on a Friday night."

High-performance and scalable storage is important for a wide range of markets and industries including media and entertainment, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and more, Nasseri said.

"It's one thing to dump file data on storage, but another to make sure it gets to where it's needed," she said. "Having intelligent storage like that offered by Qumulo is key to what we do."

Qumulo's business comes exclusively via channel partners which help the company with customer leverage and reach, Richter said.

"Customers want full solutions," he said. "We run our business by putting ourselves in our customers' shoes, where we see the need for partners to bring multiple solutions together."

Qumulo closed a closed $32.5 million in a Series C funding round in June. The company's investors, past and present, include China's Northern Light Venture Capital, Allen & Company, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Madrona Venture Group, Top Tier Capital Partners, Tyche Partners, and Valhalla Partners.

Joseph F. Kovar

Joseph F. Kovar is a senior editor and reporter for the storage and the non-tech-focused channel beats for CRN. He keeps readers abreast of the latest issues related to such areas as data life-cycle, business continuity and disaster recovery, and data centers, along with related services and software, while highlighting some of the key trends that impact the IT channel overall. He can be reached at jkovar@thechannelcompany.com.