Pure Storage netted $ 40 million in Series D funding and will use it to build out European operations and staff up its sales, marketing and engineering teams. The new round, led by Index Ventures with contributions from current backers Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, brings total capital raised to a healthy $ 95 million.
Mountain View, CA.-based Pure Storage is one of a handful of companies evangelizing use of solid state storage — which is faster but more expensive than disk storage — nearly everywhere. Many companies, including storage leader EMC, preach a tiered approach, using flash where it makes sense but disks and even tape where that is the more appropriate and cost-effective choice. (EMC itself may be wobbling on this stance, given that it spent a reported $ 400 million on Israeli flash storage player EXtremeIO.)
Earlier this week, another flash storage startup, Skyera, emerged from stealth with aggressive plans to push the cost of its flash storage systems to an impressive $ 3 per GB.
As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham wrote last August, Pure Storage fields impressive management – with founding team members coming from Zimbra, Veritas and Sun Microsystems. Its CEO, Scott Dietzen, is a respected industry veteran who co-founded Zimbra after years at BEA Systems, now part of Oracle.
Pure Storage says it’s shipped more than 100 of its FlashArrays since launching last year. As part of this funding round, Index Ventures senior partner Mike Volpi will join the board.
