Avere Closes $17 Million Series B Funding Round

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Avere Systems, the company setting new performance benchmarks with its Demand-Driven Storage™ solutions, today announced that investors have contributed an additional $17 million in funding bringing total investment in the company to $32 million and enabling it to rapidly expand production and distribution of its FXT Series appliances that accelerate the performance and reduce the costs of NAS environments.  Led by Tenaya Capital, the Series B funding round also includes original investors Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.

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Avere, which launched its FXT Series less than a year ago, has enjoyed success among customers, analysts and industry press.  In the past few months, Avere has closed major deals with companies like Sony Pictures Imageworks and GX Technology.  The company has also been recognized as a "Cool Vendor in Storage Technologies" by analyst firm Gartner Inc., among the SearchStorage.com's "Products of the Year," and named a "Product to Watch" by eWEEK magazine.

Brian Paul, Managing Director of Tenaya Capital joins the Avere Systems Board.  According to Mr. Paul, "Avere has proven to be a company that simply cannot be ignored. We have been watching Avere closely since they entered the market and we are very excited about their disruptive technology and the value they bring to customers. I look forward to joining the company's Board of Directors and helping Avere to continue to deliver superior business results."

"While we were not actively looking for additional funding in the company, we jumped at the opportunity to bring on a partner like Tenaya Capital," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems.  "We're very pleased that we can continue to expand our efforts to introduce dynamic tiering to enterprise storage customers."

The Avere FXT Series contains both solid-state storage and traditional spinning media to optimize performance without compromises on all types of workloads. Reeads, writes and metadata are allocated to storage media via Avere's unique approach to dynamic tiering. Allocation algorithms running on the FXT appliances monitor access frequency patterns and workload type and manage data placement on multiple internal tiers to increase performance, distribute workload in the cluster and minimize requests to the mass storage server. Movement of data occurs in real-time – not in hours or days – and occurs at the file-level or even block-level within a file. All of this is done automatically by the system – there are no complex policies to configure or update.

About Tenaya Capital

Tenaya Capital is a leading venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, California, and Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1995 as Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Tenaya became an independent company in 2009. Over the years they've raised five funds representing over $1 billion of committed capital, investing it in a wide range of high-growth technology companies including software, consumer Internet, communications, semiconductors, electronics, and cleantech.  For more information, visit http://www.tenayacapital.com.

About Menlo Ventures:

Menlo Ventures provides long-term capital and management support to early-stage and emerging-growth companies. Menlo is one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital partnerships, and has organized and managed ten venture funds since their inception in 1976. With over $4 billion under management since inception, and a team with over two hundred years of collective experience in technology, marketing, sales and general management, they have the resources to support the most ambitious of projects. For more information visit: www.menloventures.com/

About Norwest Venture Partners

Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a global venture and growth equity investment firm that manages more than $3.7 billion in capital. It has offices in Palo Alto, California, Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel. NVP makes early to late stage venture and growth equity investments in U.S. and global companies across a wide range of sectors including: information technology, business services, financial services and consumer. NVP has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build great businesses for more than 49 years and has funded over 450 companies since inception. For more information, please visit www.nvp.com.

About Avere Systems

Avere provides Demand-Driven Storage solutions that dynamically organize data in response to business demand. The Avere FXT Series enables faster application performance at dramatically lower cost by intelligently moving active data between traditional storage devices and FXT appliances. In benchmark SPECsfs2008 testing the FXT Series was shown to provide the highest performance and most efficient scaling with lowest cost vs. other disk-based solutions.  Installed at leading entertainment, life science and energy companies, to name a few, the FXT Series, which can be clustered for maximum scalability, tiers data on SSD and HDD media and enables a 5:1 reduction in disks, power, and rack space.  Learn more at www.averesystems.com, and you can follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.

SOURCE Avere Systems