Silicon Valley tech startup Alluxio raises $50M to grow its open-source cloud data orchestration platform and accelerate its global expansion

Alluxio (formerly Tachyon Nexus), a provider of an open-source cloud data orchestration platform, announced today it raised $50 million in Series C funding led by a leading global investment firm, with participation from existing investors including a16z, Seven Seas Partners, and Volcanics Ventures. This latest capital brings the total amount of funding raised to date to more than $70 million.

We covered Alluxio early last year when the San Mateo, California-based tech startup raised $15.5M in funding for its open-source data orchestration software for large-scale analytics and AI/ML workloads. Alongside the funding, Alluxio also announced the expansion of its Asia-Pacific presence with the opening of an office in Beijing, China. Alluxio said it will use the latest capital infusion to fuel its rapid growth by investing in expanded product capabilities as well as scaling go-to-market and engineering operations across the globe.

Founded in 2015 by CEO Haoyuan Li, Alluxio started out as an open-source project from UC Berkeley AMPLab. Over the past four years, the Alluxio team has been busy working to revolutionize the way data is stored, accessed, and managed by focusing on a memory-centric architecture. Its team consists of the creators and top committers of Alluxio.

In a statement, Li said, “To stay competitive, leading companies in all sectors are in their digitalization journey. In this, more and more enterprise architectures have shifted to hybrid and multi-cloud environments for data-driven applications. While this shift allows for more flexibility and agility, it also means having to separate compute from storage, creating new challenges in how data needs to be managed and orchestrated across frameworks, clouds and storage systems,”

Li also added, “The funding will help us further catalyze our growth and global expansion plan as we help more businesses solve the most complex data challenges in today’s world.”

Today, Alluxio enables data teams to separate compute from storage while bringing data closer to compute for analytics and AI/ML workloads spanning clouds, clusters, and regions. Alluxio’s intelligent data tiering and caching deliver better performance and reliability for customers. Today, eight of the ten largest Internet companies use Alluxio, including Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba, Tencent, and Bytedance, with many more of the largest enterprises running Alluxio in production.