SolidFire Raises $11 Million In A-Round Financing Led by New Enterprise Associates

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SolidFire, a next-generation cloud computing storage platform, today announced that the company has closed $11 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with current investors Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners participating. NEA is a leading global venture capital firm with more than $11 billion in committed capital and a 30-year track record of successful investing including enterprise storage companies such as Data Domain, 3ware, and Fusion IO.

“SolidFire is attacking an incredibly difficult and important problem in cloud computing”

The funding, which follows a $1 million seed round, will be used to expand the company in preparation for launch later this year. As part of this expansion, SolidFire has opened an office in Boulder, Colorado and will be hiring for engineering, marketing, and sales roles.

NEA General Partner Harry Weller will join SolidFire's Board of Directors alongside Valhalla General Partner Charles Curran and Novak Biddle General Partner Phil Bronner. Also joining the SolidFire board is former LeftHand Networks CEO Bill Chambers.

“SolidFire is attacking an incredibly difficult and important problem in cloud computing,” said Weller. “Offering reliable block storage as a service with consistent quality of service is a key requirement for supporting enterprise applications in both public and private clouds.”

SolidFire’s cloud-scale storage system provides reliable, high performance primary storage for demanding public cloud and enterprise private cloud environments. The company’s innovative solid state architecture independently virtualizes both capacity and performance, allowing complete flexibility in storage provisioning and management. SolidFire’s solution allows cloud providers and enterprises to take advantage of the performance, reliability and energy efficiency advantages of solid state storage at a price point comparable to conventional spinning disk.

Cloud providers interested in participating in the SolidFire beta program can contact Jay Prassl ([e-mail]).

About NEA

New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a leading venture capital and growth equity firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With approximately $11 billion in committed capital, NEA invests in information technology, healthcare and energy technology companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. Since the firm’s founding in 1978, NEA’s experienced management team has invested in over 650 companies, of which more than 165 have gone public and more than 265 have been acquired. In the U.S., NEA has two offices in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and one in Menlo Park, California. In addition, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd. has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India and New Enterprise Associates (Beijing), Ltd. has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, China. For additional information, visit www.nea.com.

About SolidFire

SolidFire is a next-generation storage platform for cloud computing providers and other enterprises that need scalable, reliable storage for thousands of servers. The company’s solution allows customers to take advantage of the performance of solid state storage at a price comparable to traditional spinning disk, while significantly reducing operational and storage management costs. For more information, go to www.solidfire.com.