Pavilion Data raises $25 million in Series C funding to accelerate the delivery of its NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage technology and expand to new markets

Pavilion Data, a data storage startup that empowers organizations to make better decisions faster with its ultra-fast, rack-scale NVMe-over-Fabric Storage Platform, announced today it has closed a $25 million Series C funding round to accelerate the delivery of the company’s NVMe-oF products, expanding to new markets, and growing the team to support customer demand. The round, which brings the total funding to $58 million, was led  by new investor Taiwania Capital with RPS Ventures joining existing investors.

Founded in 2014 by Kiran Malwankar, Sundar Kanthadai, VR Satish, Pavilion Data Systems empowers organizations to make better decisions faster. Its ultra-fast, rack-scale NVMe-over-Fabric Storage Platform ingests, processes, stores and serves an order of magnitude more data for massively-parallel modern applications.

Pavilion Data Systems brings together experienced technology professionals with expertise in storage system architecture, network switch design, dense micro-server architectures, and solid state storage technology to deliver a ground-breaking storage system design that is purpose-built to take advantage of memory-class media available both today and in the future.

Early on, Pavilion realized that that the only data center devices that can process data at a terabit per second were the network switching devices. As a result, Pavilion decided to design a storage system by borrowing architectural and design patterns from the network switch world. This has resulted in the first non-volatile memory-based storage array that is designed like a network switch. The Pavilion Memory Array is the only enterprise-class storage system leveraging a dense parallel processing architecture with built-in enterprise data management features, that delivers record-breaking performance and density, all while leveraging industry-standard hardware components wherever possible to deliver unprecedented value.

“The adoption of NVMe-oF is increasing, and Pavilion provides differentiated technology in this market. Repeat sales and strong customer demand prove that its NVMe-oF platform can bring competitive advantages to large organizations, especially those that rely on analytics and machine learning,” said Huang Lee, managing partner at Taiwania. “We are pleased to lead this round and look forward to bringing Pavilion to new markets such as Asia where the cloud-scale deployments require an NVMe-oF solution without the complexities and limitations of traditional storage.”

“Here at RPS Ventures, we appreciate the opportunity to join forces with Pavilion and the other investors to help the company expand to new verticals and other parts of the world,” said Kabir Misra. managing partner at RPS. “When we decided to invest, we looked at the large, diverse customer base, but also the strong intellectual property. We were equally impressed by its OPENCHOICE business model and how it is changing the way storage is sold today.”

“We are pleased with the Series C oversubscribed round of funding and our ongoing customer progress,” said Gurpreet Singh, CEO of Pavilion Data. “In 2019, we have delivered a large number of systems to leading organizations worldwide. Many of these customers are now purchasing additional arrays as they continue to scale out. The platform is used in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning workloads spanning IBM Spectrum Scale, MySQL, and NoSQL databases, as well as Pivotal™ Greenplum. We are also providing unification of modern cloud and legacy enterprise applications, including the Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes with persistent K8s, and VMware. We solve their challenges with the immediate benefits of an NVMe-oF system and the procurement flexibility they need through our OPENCHOICE business model.”

Pavilion was just awarded Best of Show – Most Innovative Startup at the Flash Memory Summit 2019. Earlier this year, the company was named an IDC NVMe over TCP Innovator, a CRN Hottest Storage Startups to Watch, became the first NVMe-oF solution for Spectrum Scale on IBM’s Global Solutions Directory, became a Dell Extended Technologies Partner for direct and channel resale, and was awarded five patents for a total of 16 to date. The company is an active member of NVMexpress, SNIA, STAC Research, and TACC’s STAR Program.