WHIPTAIL raises $31 million in series C and strategic funding

USA: WHIPTAIL, the data storage-industry innovator powering faster and more energy-efficient computing for today’s global businesses via flash storage, announced a $31 million investment, including strategic investments from flash-memory leader SanDisk as well as an unnamed Silicon Valley industry titan. Ignition Partners, RRE Ventures andSpring Mountain Capital also contributed to this Series C funding and Silicon Valley Bank provided debt financing.

“The intersection of performance and efficiency has never been more important as companies and organizations are moving to new technologies like flash storage to drive the top and bottom lines,” said WHIPTAIL CEO Dan Crain. “The new investors we’ve added to our existing team demonstrate the confidence they have in our vision. This funding will ensure continued growth of WHIPTAIL and accelerate our product roadmap through 2013, with groundbreaking products coming over the next 12 months that will leave our competition scrambling to catch up.”

The investment will fund growth in WHIPTAIL’s engineering team and accelerate global expansion. In addition, the company announced a new chief financial officer to lead WHIPTAIL’s fiscal policy into 2013 and beyond.

WHIPTAIL’s significant growth across its customer base, revenue and employees worldwide is a testament to the leadership and innovation provided in its all-flash storage arrays.  The company has achieved triple digit year-over-year revenue growth as more than 150 customers are now utilizing WHIPTAIL’s INVICTA and ACCELA arrays to power more than a quarter of a billion IOPS. To accommodate this expansion, WHIPTAIL’s employee base has increased by almost 500 percent in 2012.

SanDisk has announced an investment in WHIPTAIL via SanDisk Ventures, the company’s newly formed strategic investment arm.

"Enterprise storage represents a significant growth opportunity for flash, and SanDisk is excited to invest in innovative companies such as WHIPTAIL, which are bringing breakthrough system solutions to their enterprise customers,” said Sumit Sadana, executive VP and chief strategy officer at SanDisk. “Increasingly, customers are turning to flash-based solutions to address the need to access big data at lightning-fast speed, and do so with elegant, scalable, power-efficient systems from leading companies like WHIPTAIL.”

For Richard Fade, a partner at Ignition, the moves coming from WHIPTAIL have justified their investment in the company from the beginning.

“Enterprise SSD is white hot – it's becoming affordable for the datacenter, enabling competitive advantage and becoming a key tier of storage in many industries and applications,” he said. “WHIPTAIL is building the best implementations in the market. While others have been building hype, WHIPTAIL has quietly been delivering the fastest, most flexible and cost effective products in the market."

On the coattails of the strategic financing agreement, WHIPTAIL announced the hiring of CFO Catherine Chandler. Chandler brings more than 25 years of experience to WHIPTAIL. She previously served as CFO of Vitrue, a social marketing technology platform purchased by Oracle in 2012, and Liaison Technologies, an integration and data management technology services company with operations in the US and Europe.