Lightbits successfully raises $42 million in growth capital

New investment validates Lightbits as the leading platform for software-defined storage to power cloud-native data centers

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 28, 2022 – Lightbits®, the world’s first software-defined NVMe® data platform for any cloud, today announced that it has raised $42 million in growth capital. New investor Atreides Management led the round, with participation from JP Morgan, Valor Equity Partners, Eyal Ofer’s OG Tech, and Richard Li, founder and chairman of Pacific Century Group (PCG), as well as existing investors. With this financing, Lightbits has raised more than $100 million since its founding in 2016.

Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Atreides Management, said: “In today’s data-driven marketplace, enterprise and data center customers are increasingly focused on achieving superior performance, scalability, and economics. Lightbits has established itself as a clear leader in disaggregated storage solutions – well positioned to meet accelerated customer demands with its cloud-native data platform. We are excited to partner with the Lightbits team at this critical stage in the company’s evolution.”

The new investment will be used to advance the Lightbits Cloud Data Platform as the company invests in innovation and expansion. Founded by the inventors of the NVMe/TCP standard, Lightbits brings the world decoupled, composable block storage for any cloud environment (private, public, and edge). Lightbits' solution works with existing operating systems, networks, and any hardware to simplify storage for hybrid multi-clouds based on bare metal, VMware, Kubernetes, or OpenStack environments. The native NVMe/TCP architecture, coupled with innovative Intelligent Flash Management, can solve the complexity and high cost issues prevalent in today's data centers.

"The unprecedented events of the past two years, coupled with the impact of supply chain strains, have caused many organizations to think differently about their data infrastructure, rapidly accelerating the adoption of cloud solutions. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Information Technology (IT) organizations with private clouds are under tremendous pressure to be profitable and keep up with growing business demands while providing fast, resilient, and secure services," said Avigdor Willenz, co-founder and chairman of Lightbits Labs. "Lightbits invented NVMe/TCP and led the way in defining a simple, flexible, and efficient cloud-native storage architecture. Delivering these benefits can significantly increase the competitive advantage of our enterprise customers. This investment and our continued growth is a great validation of our strategy, our exceptional team, and our mission to continue leading the transformation of cloud-native data centers by delivering easy-to-use, scalable, and efficient software-defined storage."

Lightbits eliminates the complexity of storage, unlike other NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) implementations that require Fibre Channel or Remote Direct Data Access (RDMA) based on the RoCE protocol, as well as specialized network cards and drivers. The Lightbits storage solution is simple, flexible, and easy to deploy at scale on ubiquitous TCP/IP networks, while requiring no special hardware, network cards (NICs), drivers, or hypervisors on storage nodes. Today, many Fortune 1000 organizations are using Lightbits storage solutions, including several of the world's largest financial services companies, e-commerce providers, webscalers, and cloud service providers, which will help them respond to the growing business demand for fast, elastic, and secure cloud services, thereby maximizing profitability and increasing profits.

"More than 90% of companies have digital transformation needs, which is driving another demand for storage systems with higher agility, performance and capacity, which in turn will drive the widespread deployment of cloud services and NVMe-based solid-state storage in the enterprise," said Eric Burgener, research vice president of IDC's Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group. "Software-defined, disaggregated enterprise storage solutions such as Lightbits lay a good foundation for cloud service providers who need to provide agile, high-performance storage services to their customers, and the fact that Lightbits has the most mature NVMe over TCP implementation in the market will further help cloud service providers tell their 'cost-effective performance' story."

Lightbits has recently won several industry awards, including the Data Storage Innovation of the Year Award, the BIG Innovation Award, the Storage Technology Trailblazer Award, the Top 50 Startup, and the Coldago Research 2022 GEM List. These achievements highlight the company's momentum in the industry, and Lightbits can provide unparalleled cloud storage solutions and valuable features and services to the enterprise, providing IT organizations with a powerful platform to support high-performance database and analytical workloads.

Additional Resources:

• Lightbits wins Data Storage Innovation of the Year Award

•Lightbits Labs wins 2022 BIG Innovation Award

•Lightbits Labs selected in the 2021 Top 50 Startups Report

•Lightbits Labs named 2021 Digital Innovator