Expansion into Canada is among the objectives from the new cash infusion from Reduxio’s Series C funding.
Mike Grandinetti, Reduxio’s Marketing and Strategy Officer
San Francisco-based Reduxio, which has brought a new type of storage architecture to market, has announced it has secured $USD 22.5 million of its Series C funding round, over half of the round’s $32 million expected total. The round was led by London-based C5 Capital, with all previous investors also participating in this round, and some of the funds will be used to drive the company’s first penetration of the Canadian market.
Reduxio was started in Israel. Mark Weiner, their CEO and co-founder, was an early employee of NetApp in Europe, and built a billion dollar run rate business for NetApp in Europe at a time when NetApp was the foremost innovator in storage.
“The founders teamed up with a couple of legendary Israeli storage architects, and they came up with a radical new architecture of what storage architecture should look like, which tore up the old ideas,” said Mike Grandinetti, Reduxio’s Marketing and Strategy Officer. They encountered a lot of skepticism from Israeli venture capitalists, but were able to get backing of two VC firms and get the architecture built, because of the reputation of the founders.” It launched at VMworld 2015, and received a very positive evaluation, winning the Best of Show Gold Award in Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure. They have since sold over 150 systems to over 100 distinct accounts.
Grandinetti said that the current Version 2 of the Reduxio TimeOS solution has four use cases, which revolve around Reduxio’s trademarked Backdating capability, which allows for instant data recovery.
“It has the ability to recover databases instantly, the ability to recover virtual environments instantly, the ability to recover dev/test environments instantly, and the ability to laugh in the face of a cyberhacker when he has encrypted your files and is demanding ransom. You don’t even have to do snapshots. That’s something we have obsoleted. We recovered a police station’s data in less than 20 minutes after a ransomware attack. The same station had earlier taken 36 hours to recover from a loss of their system.”
The technology also features NoDup global in-line in-memory data deduplication and data compression, and Tier-X continuous autonomous multi-level tiering. The block-level tiering combines SSDs and HDDs, to provide inexpensive SSD performance.
Their customers are clustered in a number of industries. Manufacturers include Israeli defense company Elbit, Elbit, tractor-marker Kuboda, and Array Networks. Education customers include USC, the University of Georgia and multiple unified school districts. They are also strong in the state and local government space, among MSPs, and in the professional services space. The latter include a Silicon Valley venture cap firm, and structural engineering and biotech firms.
“Reduxio can be operated from a phone, so even small IT departments can manage it,” Grandinetti said. “A quarter of our sales are also customers coming back for their second and third order.”
Reduxio is unusual in having started right out of the gate with a 100 per cent channel strategy.
“Every single deal goes through a partner,” Grandinetti said. “We have been primarily working with smaller regional resellers who are more technically forward. In part that’s because a lot of the more established channel partners are cautious with young companies and want to see what happens. We had to prove ourselves. Some partners have started their first storage practise based on us because they now have something unique to offer companies.”
Their partners include MR2 Solutions, based in the LA basin, which Grandinetti said had closed a number of very significant deals. New England-based Axis Business Solutions was one of VMware’s very significant early channel partners. Whalley Computer Associates, also based in New England, is very strong in the education sector nationally. Atlanta-based Halski Systems is significant across the southeast.
“This quarter alone, we are doing 30 events with partners in the U.S.,” Grandinetti said.
Canada has no partners yet, but Grandinetti said that’s coming, with sales people in Seattle, Chicago and the east scheduled to go into western Canada, Ontario and Quebec respectively.
“Part of the new funding round is expanding, and we intend to get a presence in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver,” Grandinetti said.
C5 Capital, a specialist investment manager focused on cyber security, data analytics and cloud computing, is the lead investor in this funding round, which more than doubles the amount of capital invested in the company. All previous investors, including Jerusalem Venture Partners, Carmel Ventures, Intel Capital and Seagate Technology also took part in this fundraising round.
