Lightbits Raised $42 Million in Growth Capital

New investment validates Lightbits as the leading platform in software-defined storage to power the cloud-native data center evolution.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lightbits®, the 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, alongside J.P. Morgan, Valor Equity Partners, Eyal Ofer’s O.G. Tech, founder and chairman of Pacific Century Group (PCG) Richard Li, existing investors, and others. With this financing, the company has raised more than $100 million since its founding in 2016.

“In today’s data-driven market, 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—poised to meet accelerated customer demand with its cloud-native data platform. We are excited to partner with the Lightbits team at a critical stage in the company’s growth trajectory,” said Gavin Baker, Manager Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Atreides Management.

The new investment will be used to fuel the growth of the Lightbits Cloud Data Platform, as the company invests in innovation and expansion. Founded by the inventors of the NVMe/TCP standard, Lightbits introduced the world to disaggregated, composable block storage for any cloud: private clouds, public clouds, and edge clouds. Lightbits works with existing operating systems, networking, and any hardware—simplifying storage for hybrid multi-cloud implementations on bare metal, VMware, Kubernetes, or OpenStack environments. The native NMVe/TCP architecture, coupled with innovative Intelligent Flash Management, solves the complexity and high-cost problems endemic in data centers today.

“The unprecedented events of the past two years and the impact of strained supply chains, have organizations thinking differently about their data infrastructure, rapidly accelerating the adoption of cloud solutions. There is tremendous pressure on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and IT Organizations with private clouds to profitably keep pace with growing business demand while providing fast, resilient, and secure services,” said Avigdor Willenz, Co-Founder and Chairman of Lightbits Labs. “Lightbits invented NVMe/TCP and has led the way in defining a cloud-native storage architecture that is simple, agile, and efficient. Delivering these benefits significantly improves the competitive advantage of our enterprise customers. This investment and our continued growth are validation of our strategy, our incredible team, and our mission to lead the cloud-native data center transformation by delivering scalable and efficient software-defined storage that is easy to consume.”

Lightbits eliminates storage complexities, unlike other NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) implementations that require Fibre Channel or RDMA via the RoCE protocol, with specialized network interface cards and drivers. It’s simple, flexible, and easy to deploy at scale on ubiquitous TCP/IP networks, requiring no special hardware, NICs, drivers, or hypervisor on the storage nodes. Today, Lightbits is used by many Fortune 1000 organizations, including several of the world’s largest financial services companies, e-commerce providers, webscalers, and CSPs in response to growing business demand for fast, resilient, and secure cloud services that maximize profitability and improve margins.

“The demands of digital transformation, under way at more than 90% of companies, are driving a need for increased agility, performance, and capacity in storage systems, which in turn has driven broad deployment of cloud services and NVMe-based solid-state storage in enterprises,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. “Software-defined, disaggregated enterprise storage solutions like Lightbits provide a great foundation for cloud service providers that need to provide agile and performant storage services for their own customers, and the fact that Lightbits has the most mature NVMe over TCP implementation in the market further helps their 'cost-effective performance' story.”

Lightbits was recently awarded Data Storage Innovation Of The Year, BIG Innovation Award, Tech Trailblazer in Storage, Big50 Startup, and Coldago Research GEMS 2022. These achievements highlight the company’s industry momentum to deliver unmatched cloud storage with enterprise-rich features and services that provide IT with a robust platform to support high-performance databases and analytics workloads.

Additional resources:

• Lightbits Wins Data Storage Innovation of the Year
• Lightbits Labs Wins 2022 BIG Innovation Award
• Lightbits Labs Featured in 2021 Big50 Startup Report
• Lightbits Labs Named Digital Innovator 2021

About Lightbits Labs

Lightbits Labs® (Lightbits), is on a mission to make high-performance block storage simple, scalable, and cost-efficient for any cloud. Lightbits offers a Cloud Data Platform that delivers efficiency, simplicity, and agility for modern data centers. Inventors of the NVMe® over TCP (NVMe/TCP) protocol, Lightbits is leading the digital data center transformation by making software-defined storage that is easy to deploy at scale and delivers performance equivalent to local flash to accelerate cloud-native applications in bare metal, virtual, or containerized environments.

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