By Rile at July 13, 2011 | 10:26 am | Print
A Q&A With Venture Capital Darling Nimble Storage
VC darling (www.nimblestorage.com) has earned the title ?the most successful storage start-up in 10 years? (despite the economy) winning awards and recognition from the WSJ (#17 of top VC-backed companies? story follows), CRN, Infoworld, Network World and more.
On July 14, they will be announcing they have closed a $25 million over-subscribed Series D round of funding just about 6 months after receiving $16 million in a over-subscribed Series C round. They will also be announcing a new product for the SME market that is expected to be very well received.
Although the company does not need the money, this new round demonstrates the excitement about the market opportunity that is surrounding Nimble Storage.
This round of funding is being led by Artis Capital Management, the largest shareholder of Data Domain, which was purchased by EMC for $2.1 billion. Their investments tend to be very exclusive and stealth. Existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital were also involved in the round. Nimble also received a mention in an recent Wall Street Journal article just published ?The Next Big Thing: Which VC Firms Hold Top Bragging Rights?
VisionWiz spoke with Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Varun Mehta, Founder and VP of Engineering, and Umesh Maheshwari, CTO, about the company?s relevance and growth.
Who cares about this and why?
1. IT managers tasked with trying to manage the cost and complexity of primary storage, backup and disaster recovery. Storage is growing more expensive and complex every day and storage professionals are required to manage upwards of 5 different devices for storage, backup and disaster recovery. Nimble Storage converges multiple storage devices into a single solution while also reducing backup windows from hours or even days to seconds at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions.
? Can you explain what the company is trying to do?
1. Nimble Storage is dedicated to recreating the way companies store and backup their data. Nimble Storage has created the industry?s first converged primary storage and backup device that provides a cheaper, more efficient and effective way to manage data storage.
? In three sentences or less, can you succinctly explain how Nimble Storage is different?and why that will make it profitable?
1. Nimble Storage?s CASL architecture (explained below) not only reduces the cost and complexity of primary storage and backup, but also provides an effective, immediately deployable solution for quick disaster recovery that delivers up to 20 times the speed and efficiency of conventional SAN replication. Nimble Storage answers an industry pain that up until now has taken multiple vendors and devices and hundreds of thousands of dollar to solve (and even then incompletely). Nimble Storage has created one solution that solves multiple storage challenges at a fraction of the cost of the competition.
? What is the key technology enabling the company?s product or service?
1. Nimble?s key technology is its breakthrough Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture.
? How does the technology work?
1. Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL?), is designed from the ground up to leverage flash memory in combination with high-capacity, drives to provide high performance at a low cost. What?s more, WAN-efficient replication enables backup to a remote Nimble array, giving enterprises of almost any size a complete, cost-effective disaster recovery solution.
? In what year was the company founded?
& How many employees do you have?
1. Our company founded in 2008 and we have around 80 employees at present.
? Why was the company founded?
1. The company was founded by Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari, veterans of NetApp and Data Domain, who had a vision for an innovative approach to enterprise storage and backup that would take advantage of flash to deliver performance that was not possible with disk drives or tape. They had a vision to build a system from scratch that would address the needs of primary storage, backup and disaster recovery that had never been done before.
? What?s the background of the founders?
1. Nimble was founded by Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari.
1. Prior to founding Nimble Varun was vice president of engineering at PeakStream Inc., a startup that was acquired by Google. Varun also served as vice president of engineering and was the twelfth employee at Data Domain, where he built the team that delivered the company?s first products to market and sold 800+ units in its first two years of shipping.
2. Prior to founding Nimble, Umesh was an early architect at Data Domain where he developed parts of their deduplicating file system and WAN-efficient replication. Previously, Umesh was at Zambeel, a maker of scalable file servers, where he developed a clusterized metadata service and automatic network configuration.
? Who is your ideal user?
1. An storage manager or IT generalist
? What is the size of the market you are aiming for?
1. Midsize enterprise. Generally companies between 200 and 5000 employees.
? Who are your competitors?
1. EMC 2. Dell EqualLogic 3. NetApp
? Briefly explain why the company?s product or service is better than what rivals offer.
1. Nimble Storage offers vastly better storage efficiency and price-performance than any existing storage offerings. Nimble is able to eliminate backup windows and reduce the cost and complexity of managing primary storage.
? What?s the evidence of traction?
1. Nimble Storage has ramped revenue faster than the most successful storage startups of the past decade.
2. Received numerous recognitions and awards including: Recognized by Gartner as a ?Cool Vendor?, CRN?s Product of the year, WSJ?s Next Big Thing, InfoWorld?s Top 25 Hot Products, Network Worlds Top 25 companies to watch, Network Products Guide Hot Companies 2011 and many others available here.
? What numbers or other evidence can you provide to show that the company is succeeding?
1. Nimble has amassed over 100 customers. 2. Nimble tripled its revenue goals in 2010. 3.Nimble has received back-to-back over-subscribed rounds of funding.
? What is its next milestone?
1. To reach profitability
? Who are your investors?
1. Artis Capital Management (the former lead investor in Data Domain who was recently acquired by EMC for $2.1B). 2. Accel Partners
3. Lightspeed Venture Partners. 4.Sequoia Capital
? How much funding have you raised to date, across how many rounds? When was the most recent one?
1. Rounds A-C totaled $33 million. 2.Series D of $25M will be announced July 14. Prior to that Nimble received an over-subscribed Series C round of $16M.
By
Riley
Riley McderMid has worked for Merger Market.In past she has worked for The New York Times as syndicated reporter where she covered venture capital funding trends across Silicon Valley and the larger start-up community.
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Source: http://visionwiz.net/2011/07/a-qa-with-venture-capital-darling-nimble-storage/
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