Diablo Technologies Closes $28 Million Equity Investment

OTTAWA, Ontario, Nov. 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Diablo Technologies, a proven innovator in memory system interface products, today announced the closing of a $28 million funding round—adding several new US and European investors and Board members. The investment will be used to complete its groundbreaking Memory Channel Storage™(MCS) technology platform. The soon-to-be-announced MCS system of products enable substantial improvements in transaction processing and data analysis within compute-servers, enterprise datacenters and cloud-computing facilities worldwide. The funding round was led by Battery Ventures and included additional financing from Celtic House Venture Partners, BDC Venture Capital, and Hasso Plattner Ventures.

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Riccardo Badalone, founder and Chief Executive Officer commented: "Over the past two years Diablo Technologies has developed an innovative memory channel-based solid-state storage platform. With this equity funding we are accelerating the completion of a system solution including hardware, software and a chip-set that will deliver breakthroughs in system performance and flash storage density for analytic data processing, web-page serving, cloud computing and other server-based enterprise computing applications. We are pleased to welcome Scott Tobin and Alex Benik both of Battery Ventures, and Yaron Valler from Hasso Plattner Ventures to our Board of Directors."

"Storage is undergoing the type of a technological revolution that we see only once every few decades, and it's an exciting time to be involved with the entrepreneurs and technologists who are leading this new wave," said Scott Tobin, Battery General Partner.  "Today's emerging companies are attacking tough strategic problems, and creating tremendous value across the enterprise-storage stack.  We believe Diablo Technologies has the technology and creativity to usher in the next phase of innovation in NAND-flash storage. This investment is the perfect complement to our recent success in the flash storage space, with Anobit (flash memory controllers) being acquired by Apple, and XtremIO (scale-out flash arrays) being acquired by EMC."

"Existing investors BDC and Celtic House are tremendously excited to see the evolution of Diablo being positioned to redefine in-memory computing," said Tom Valis of Celtic House Venture Partners.

About Diablo Technologies

Founded in 2003, Diablo is successfully delivering products that enhance the performance and capability of memory system designs.  Diablo's innovative Memory Channel Storage technology platform is leveraging the disruptive capability of NAND-flash and future Non-Volatile Memory technologies to enable increased levels of application performance supported by a new class of enterprise server and storage system designs.

The Diablo executive management team, now developing its third family of memory interface solutions, has decades of experience in system architecture, chip-set design and software development at companies including Nortel Networks, Matrox Graphics, Goal Semiconductor, BroadTel Communications, ENQ Semiconductor, IceFyre Semiconductor, Mosaid Techologies and Huawei.

About Battery Ventures
Since 1983, Battery has been investing in technology and innovation worldwide. The firm partners with entrepreneurs and management teams across technology sectors, geographies and stages of a company's life, from seed, start-up and expansion financing, to growth equity and buyouts.

Battery has supported many breakthrough companies around the world, including seven companies who have IPO'd in the past fourteen months.  Past portfolio companies include:  Akamai Technologies (IPO), Angie's List (IPO), Anobit (acquired by Apple), Groupon (IPO), ITA Software (acquired by Google), Kashya (acquired by EMC), Netezza (acquired by IBM), VSS Monitoring (acquired by Danaher), and XtremIO (acquired by EMC). Its current portfolio includes emerging and more established firms such as Bazaarvoice (IPO), Calxeda, Continuuity, Cumulus Networks, Delphix, ExactTarget (IPO), Guidewire (IPO), Marketo, Nutanix, Opscode, and Zerto.

Battery has offices in Boston, Silicon Valley and Israel.  It has raised nearly $4B since inception, and is currently investing a $750M fund.  For more information, visit www.battery.com.  Follow us @batteryventures.

About Celtic House Venture Partners
Celtic House Venture Partners is an independent Canadian investment firm. Since 1994, Celtic House has been one of Canada's most active investors in technology and innovation. Capitalizing on the deep domain expertise of its partners, Celtic House has consistently provided superior financial returns to its investors. Celtic House has collaborated with management teams and entrepreneurs to develop technology companies from the inception phase through acquisition and over 20 initial public offerings. From offices in Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa, Celtic House manages over $425 million across three funds. For more information, visit www.celtic-house.com/.

About BDC Venture Capital 
BDC Venture Capital is a major venture capital investor in Canada. We work with entrepreneurs and other investors to build outstanding Canadian companies, and are involved at every stage of our investee companies' development cycles, from seed through expansion. Our goal is to deliver excellent return on our investments while fulfilling a crucial role as a strategic partner in the Canadian venture capital industry. With more than $1 billion in current and planned investments and 25 years of experience in venture capital, our focus is on innovative IT, health and energy/clean technology companies with high growth potential.

About Hasso Plattner Ventures
Hasso Plattner Ventures was founded in July 2005 in Potsdam near Berlin, Germany with a goal to invest in the area of information technology. In 2008 a second fund was created, which has widened the focus to include clean-tech as well as firmly established companies. SAP Co-Founder Prof. Dr. h. c. Hasso Plattner supplies the lion's share of investment capital, followed by InvestitionsBank Brandenburg, CMEA Capital, Shai Agassi and Arnon Katz. The portfolio companies benefit not only from financial support but also from the skills and experiences of the highly qualified team. Together with Diablo Technologies, the company's portfolio now includes 22 businesses. More information is available at www.hp-ventures.com.

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SOURCE Diablo Technologies