Investors Back Avere with Additional $20 Million

PITTSBURGH, July 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Avere Systems today announced that it has received an additional $20 million in funding bringing the total amount invested in the company to $52 million.  The Series C funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and also includes previous investors Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital.

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The funding will be used to advance the market penetration of the company's FXT Series Edge filers, which are an integral building block for an Edge-Core architecture for NAS that ensures enterprise IT is best positioned to leverage the performance benefits of Flash, the consolidation benefits of virtualization and the collaborative and economic benefits of the cloud. Avere's new architecture for NAS puts the fastest media and the intelligence to manage it closest to the user, boosting performance and removing storage bottlenecks created by legacy architectures. 

Chris Schaepe of Lightspeed Venture Partners led the Series C financing. Chris is a founding managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners with over 20 years of venture capital experience in areas including enterprise storage, networking, cloud and mobile technologies. Chris was recently named to the 2012 Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Venture Capitalists. 

"Avere has been successful in achieving revenue growth based on the fact that its Edge filers deliver superior performance while leveraging existing storage infrastructure in both local and remote access environments," said Schaepe.   "The combination of a seasoned executive team, a well-established product line and the ability to capitalize on major technological shifts based on the emergence of Flash, virtualization and cloud deployments made the investment in Avere a compelling opportunity for Lightspeed. We look forward to working with the Avere team to continue to build a business that revolutionizes data storage."

"This round of funding will be used to extend our market presence by leveraging the success of our Edge filer product line and scaling the outbound functions of the company," said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. "As our largest round of funding to date, Series C is a vote of confidence in the Edge-Core NAS architecture and the ability to help organizations build a storage infrastructure that is fast and efficient, flexible and scalable, global and responsive."

About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management.  Lightspeed's investment professionals and advisors are located in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners.  Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed more than 200 companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Calista, Ciena, DoubleClick, eHealth, Fusion-io, Galileo Technology, Growth Networks, Informatica, Kiva Software, Kosmix, Link-A-Media, LivingSocial, Lucky Pai, Maker Communications, Phone.com, Playdom, Pliant, Provigent, Riverbed Technology, Solazyme, TutorVista, Virsa Systems, Waveset, and XtremIO. For more information, visit the Lightspeed website: www.lightspeedvp.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 (NVP)
Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a global venture and growth equity investment firm that manages more than $3.7 billion in capital. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, NVP has subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel and Hong Kong. NVP makes early to late stage venture and growth equity investments across a wide range of sectors including: information technology, business services, financial services, infrastructure, technology enabled services and consumer. NVP has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build great businesses for more than 50 years and has funded over 500 companies since inception. For more information visit: www.nvp.com.

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 Avere Systems
Avere Systems brings to the market NAS Optimization solutions designed specifically to scale performance and capacity separately and take advantage of new storage media using real-time tiering. Avere's FXT Series Edge filers allow organizations to achieve unlimited application performance scaling, free applications from the confines of the data center by eliminating latency and cut storage costs by more than half. Learn more at www.averesystems.com, and you can follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.

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SOURCE Avere Systems