Storage uber alles: SoftBank chucks $20 mill into Nexenta's hat

Software-defined storage biz Nexenta has picked up another $20m in funding.

It is effectively an H-round, following last year's $7.7m G-round and takes total funding, we think, to $141.5m. The main funder in the latest round is SoftBank and there is a strategic distribution and go-to-market agreement between it and Nexenta.

Other investors were Javelin Venture Partners, SV Booth Investments, SAB Capital, Lake Trail Capital, TRB Equity, and, get this, Tarkan Maner, CEO and chairman at Nexenta. That's putting skin in the game.

His enthusiastic prepared quote said that, with the funding: "Nexenta will extend its market and innovation leadership into new geographic, vertical and differentiated IP markets from IoT to Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Big Data supporting any type of computing from the Edge to Core and Cloud Data Center Computing – on any type of hardware or compute platform, via any protocol, for any app on any hybrid or multi-cloud deployment.”

The SoftBank agreement has commercial dimensions around SoftBank’s distribution and usage of the Nexenta portfolio, and collaborative integrated OpenSDS systems development with SoftBank and its preferred hardware partners. It features:

• Strategic distribution in Japan, the 2nd largest storage market world-wide,
• All Softbank-affiliate companies to prefer Nexenta for storage needs where appropriate – especially in software-defined storage space,
• Softbank Cloud to use Nexenta for storage,
• New GTM partnerships through Softbank server partnerships and programs – around Dell, Foxconn, Ericsson, Huawei, Lenovo, Supermicro and others.

Maner told us: "We are continuing our big growth numbers into FY18, with 80 per cent year-on-year growth coming out of FY17." ®