Nutanix Accelerates Transformation of Enterprise Datacenters With Historic $101 Million Funding Round

Approximate $1 Billion Valuation Driven By Unprecedented Customer Traction - $100 Million in Lifetime Sales; 13 Million-Dollar Accounts; 70 Percent Repeat Purchase Rate

Nutanix Customers as of January 2014 (Graphic: Business Wire)

SAN JOSE, Calif.--()--Nutanix, the leading provider of next-generation datacenter infrastructure solutions, today announced that it has closed its $101 million Series D financing co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures. Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Greenspring Associates also participated in the round as new investors, joining existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Battery Ventures in the largest single financing round in the history of the converged infrastructure market. The company has now raised a total of $172.2 million in four rounds of funding. Nutanix will use the new funding to accelerate its global expansion, boost investments in research and development, expand its service delivery capabilities and grow its sales, marketing and support teams.

Nutanix is now uniquely capitalized to service the needs of global enterprise customers with backing from top Silicon Valley venture capital firms and strategic investments from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital (a private equity fund within Morgan Stanley Investment Management), two leading global financial institutions; Riverwood, an investor with strong contacts and expertise in global high-tech manufacturing; and SAP Ventures, an independent venture firm affiliated with SAP AG, with a deep understanding of large scale enterprise applications, markets and customers.

Jeff Parks, a founding partner of Riverwood Capital and former executive at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., has been named to the Nutanix board of directors. In a separate appointment, industry veteran Mike Scarpelli, CFO of ServiceNow and former CFO of Data Domain, has also been named to Nutanix’s board of directors.

“Nutanix is one of a very small class of companies that is transforming the way enterprises deliver IT,” said Jeff Parks, founding partner of Riverwood Capital. “We are very excited to partner with Dheeraj Pandey and his world-class management team as they build the next-generation enterprise computing company.”

“Nutanix represents the future of datacenter infrastructure and is a best-in-class platform to run all virtualized enterprise workloads,” said Jai Das, managing director at SAP Ventures. “We look forward to assisting the team on closer alignment with enterprise business applications — a critical component to accelerating Nutanix’s growth within Global 2000 organizations — and helping the company leverage the SAP ecosystem.”

Nutanix has exceeded $100 million in lifetime sales and acquired 13 customers who have purchased more than $1 million of products within two years of launching its award-winning Virtual Computing Platform, cementing its status as the fastest-growing infrastructure company of the decade. Due to an aggressive global expansion strategy, international sales now account for 33 percent of the business and the company has shipped product to more than 30 countries in the last six months.

“Lightspeed has invested in more than 200 companies and Nutanix ranks best-in-class in terms of sales velocity,” said Ravi Mhatre, founding partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We continue to be impressed with the execution by the company and welcome our new investors to the team.”

“Adoption of web-scale computing, and Nutanix’s Virtual Computing Platform in particular, has grown explosively over the last two years, yet we’ve only scratched the surface of this $100 billion hybrid computing market,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. “The additional support from such a high-quality investor group leaves us uniquely positioned to capitalize on the opportunity and build one of the elite companies of this decade.”

Leading enterprises including eBay, McKesson, Toyota, Orange Business Services and Hyundai Hysco, to name a few, have adopted Nutanix as their preferred infrastructure platform for running high-performance virtualized workloads. These organizations seek the simplicity, scalability and efficiency of web-scale datacenters, such as those operated by Google and Facebook, to power their private cloud environments.

“Nutanix represents a significant improvement to the simplicity of large scale datacenter architecture,” said Drew Trieger, virtualization architect at eBay. “We had considered alternative solutions from established players as well as newer companies, but none could match the combination of performance, compact footprint, ease of use and flexibility of the Nutanix platform. Today’s investment round validates our decision to choose Nutanix and ensures they will continue to deliver innovative solutions to our datacenter challenges for years to come.”

Nutanix’s commitment to developing game-changing technology and providing industry-leading customer support coupled with its unrivaled scale-out architecture has enabled the company to achieve extraordinary repeat purchase rates. “More than 50 percent of Nutanix customers purchase again after only six months and nearly 70 percent purchase additional units within 12 months,” said Ken Long, vice president of accounting at Nutanix.

About Riverwood Capital

Riverwood Capital is a globally focused private equity firm that invests in high-growth businesses in the technology and services industries, across a variety of verticals and geographies. Riverwood was established by a talented group of private equity and technology industry executives, which gives Riverwood a unique combination of operational, strategic, financial and technical insight into investment candidates and portfolio companies. Riverwood has offices in Menlo Park, CA, New York, NY, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Beijing, China. Riverwood was founded in 2008 and has raised over $1 billion since inception. www.riverwoodcapital.com

About SAP Ventures

SAP Ventures, with more than US$1.4 billion under management, is an investment firm that seeks to partner with outstanding entrepreneurs and leading venture firms worldwide to build industry-leading businesses. SAP Ventures is an independent investment organization affiliated with SAP AG, the leading global enterprise software company. SAP Ventures leverages its relationship with SAP and its ecosystem for the benefit of its portfolio companies and underlying fund managers. SAP Ventures was founded in 1997 and has invested in more than 125 companies across five continents. For more information, please visit http://www.sapventures.com/

About Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital

Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, a private equity fund within Morgan Stanley Investment Management, invests in private emerging growth companies. Since 1986, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and its predecessor funds have invested over $1.1 billion in over 150 companies. For more information, please visit www.morganstanley.com/institutional/expansion-capital/

About Greenspring Associates

Established in 2000 as a global venture capital firm, Greenspring Associates currently manages both a dedicated later stage direct investment platform as well as a globally diversified fund-of-funds platform with $2.4 billion under management. Since inception, the firm has invested in over 60 portfolio companies alongside of its leading venture capital and growth equity managers both in the United States and Europe. Through the firm’s value-added investment approach, it primarily invests across the information technology and communications stack as well as in the healthcare vertical.

About Nutanix

Nutanix delivers web-scale IT infrastructure to medium and large enterprises with its software-driven Virtual Computing Platform, natively converging compute and storage into a single solution to drive unprecedented simplicity in the datacenter. Customers can start with a few servers and scale to thousands, with predictable performance and economics. With a patented elastic data fabric and consumer-grade management, Nutanix is the blueprint for application-optimized and policy-driven infrastructure. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.

Contacts

Bateman Group for Nutanix
Scott Beaver, 415-503-1818
nutanix@bateman-group.com
or
Nutanix
Declan Waters, 408-510-0414
Director, Corporate Communications
dwaters@nutanix.com

Release Summary

Nutanix today announced that it has closed its $101 million Series D financing co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures.

Contacts

Bateman Group for Nutanix
Scott Beaver, 415-503-1818
nutanix@bateman-group.com
or
Nutanix
Declan Waters, 408-510-0414
Director, Corporate Communications
dwaters@nutanix.com