E8 Storage Raises $12 Million Series B Led by Accel to Create a New Performance Standard for Storage

LONDON and TEL AVIV, Israel, May 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

E8 Storage, an early-stage enterprise storage company based in Israel, today announces a $12 million Series B financing round led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. The investment will help the company to launch its next-generation flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud.

As new generations of high-performance enterprise applications come to market, businesses are trying to find ways to improve the performance and latency of their data centres. This has led to the introduction of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), a new standard of flash storage which is significantly faster than previous generations of flash storage. NVMe has the potential to unlock massive performance improvements and enable a new generation of applications to emerge. However, existing flash array architectures were not designed with NVMe devices in mind. Because of this, enterprises are missing out on NVMe's huge potential to make high-performance applications run much cheaper and faster.

As the first shared, software-defined NVMe solution in the industry, E8 Storage's rack-scale flash architecture has been designed to maximise the performance of NVMe for high-performance enterprise applications. The solution performs 10x faster than existing all-flash arrays with lower total costs. In live beta tests, E8's appliance has delivered unprecedented performance (10M IOPS) and latency on par with local NVMe flash (100us/50us of read/write). E8 combines these performance metrics with the benefits of software-based centralised storage, making it an ideal choice for use in high-performance enterprise applications such as real-time market data analytics, hyper-scale data centres and high-performance computing.

Zivan Ori, CEO and co-founder of E8 Storage, stated: "We are excited to have Accel join our existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. Today's investment brings us closer to launching our software-centric solution, which is currently in beta testing, as the only scale-out solution in the industry. It provides a rich feature set of data services such as high availability, RAID and thin provisioning, and can be easily scaled and upgraded as hardware components improve. The fast-growing interest in E8 Storage proves that the market for shared NVMe solutions is definitely maturing."

As part of the funding round, Accel's Kevin Comolli, who led the investment, will be joining E8's board. Comolli said: "The next generation of high-performance enterprise applications such as big data analytics and IoT data processing require a fundamental rethink of our existing data centre architectures. E8 has built a game-changing storage product, and the overwhelming feedback from its beta tests has demonstrated strong product market fit for its rack-scale flash solution. We have been very impressed with the team from the outset and we're confident in the company's potential to become a leading player in enterprise storage."

E8 Storage will use the new funding for accelerating its go-to-market by hiring a sales and marketing team in the US, as well as doubling its R&D team in Israel. E8 Storage was founded in 2014 by Zivan Ori and Alex Friedman who serve as CEO and VP R&D respectively.

About E8 Storage 

E8 Storage provides the next generation of flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud, delivering 10 times the performance for half the cost of existing storage products, while using only off-the-shelf hardware. E8 Storage's appliance eliminates storage need projections, is easily upgradeable and expandable, enables converged networking, and increases SSD utilization to over 90%. With E8 Storage, data centers can enjoy unprecedented storage performance density and scale, delivering on the promise of software-defined storage without compromising on reliability and availability. For more information please visit: http://www.e8storage.com

About Accel 

Accel is a leading early- and growth-stage venture capital firm, powering a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel backs entrepreneurs who have what it takes to build a world-class, category-defining business. Founded in 1983, Accel brings more than three decades of experience building and supporting hundreds of companies. Accel's vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries. Accel has backed a number of iconic global platforms, which are powering new experiences for mobile consumers and the modern enterprise, including Atlassian, Avito, BlaBlaCar, Deliveroo, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Funding Circle, Kayak, QlikTech, Simplivity, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, WorldRemit and others.

About Magma Venture Partners 

Magma Venture Partners is a leading Israeli venture capital firm, dedicated to investing in Israel's Information, Communications and Technology space ('ICT'), including the software, semiconductor and new media spheres. We seek bright ideas at their earliest stages, and serve as a springboard for our entrepreneurs as they develop and evolve into industry leaders. Our goal is to enable a flow of innovation from the earliest stage all the way through until a company realizes its potential reach. Magma's partners connect industry experts and investors to support entrepreneurs as they build successful companies that disrupt and redefine ICT's future. For more information, please visit: http://www.magmavc.com

About Vertex Venture Capital 

Vertex Venture Capital is a unique top-tier Israeli VC with $600 million under management, a strong international investor base, an experienced multi-disciplinary team of professionals and an impressive track record of exits through M&A and IPO. Vertex provides unparalleled possibilities for companies in facilitating potential growth, business opportunities and leveraging synergies throughout Israel, Europe, USA, Japan and Asia. Vertex invests in Israeli and Israel-related companies in early stages of development in information networking and communications systems, software and components, digital media and enterprise software. For more information, please visit: http://www.VertexVC.com

E8 Storage Media Contact:

Maya Lustig
M: +972-(0)54-677-8100
[email protected]

Accel Media Contact:

Eliza Dabney
[email protected]

SOURCE E8 Storage