Object storage sweetheart Cloudian bags another $94m funding in E round

Cloudian has sucked up $94m in yet another funding round that takes the total amount raised to $173m – higher than the $152m so far bagged by arch-rival Scality.

The two object storage suppliers are hogging most of the investment in the sector with their individual funding dwarving that of Swiftstack's $23.6m.

This E-round at Cloudian comprised contributions from Digital Alpha, Fidelity Eight Roads, Goldman Sachs, INCJ, JPIC (Japan Post Investment Corporation), NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. and WS Investments.

The round includes a $25m investment from Digital Alpha that was confirmed in February.

Cloudian claimed it will use the cash to expand worldwide sales and marketing work and increase its engineering team.

One of its concerns in engineering could centre on the adoption of QLC (4bits/cell) flash technology, with SSDs using it becoming the first realistic alternative to disk drives for fast access object storage. Cloudian has no confirmed QLC flash tech under development.

The latest Cloudian customers include public health agencies in the US and UK, two of the top-five Formula One teams, a US national research lab, a large online travel agent, a top-three pharmaceutical firm and a top-three global car maker, a top-five European bank, an Ivy League university, and one of the world's largest global engineering companies.

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Cloudian, which is targeting Global 2000 enterprise customers, has a mix of on-prem storage and public cloud S3 backend tiering, and scale that allows it to tap into the IoT game.

A looming collision in the market is between secondary storage convergers, such as Cohesity, putting out the idea of a single, global secondary storage repository, and object storage players resolutely resisting this idea, unless it's their object storage that is the convergence tech.

We'll venture the view that no object storage startup has yet had a successful IPO. Exits, such as those by Amplidata and Bycast StorageGRID, have been via acquisition. 

Both Scality and Cloudian are well-funded and each have a large number of customers. Either one could be the first to float on the US Exchanges. ®