Cloudian Inc., a maker of data center storage appliances, today said it has raised a hefty $94 million in a Series E round of equity funding that brings its total amount raised to $173 million. Cloudian said it’s the largest fund-raising round ever by an object storage company.

Eight Roads Ventures, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, Japan Post Investment Corp., Lenovo Group Ltd., NTT Docomo Ventures Inc. and WS Investments all participated in the round, which also includes an earlier $25 million investment from private equity firm Digital Alpha Capital that was announced in February.

Cloudian sells an “object storage” appliance it claims is “infinitely scalable,” with integrated data management features and broad interoperability. Object storage supports unstructured data, and it’s increasingly popular in big-data projects. Cloudian’s products, primarily used in corporate data centers, can also be joined to public cloud storage services such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 via application programming interfaces to create a single storage pool from multiple sources.

“The problem we solve is getting more pervasive,” said Chief Marketing Officer Jon Toor. “You’d think the cloud has solved all the big storage problems, but we see the challenge of data gravity as being very real. Data tends to stay where it’s created.”

Cloudian’s fresh funding comes at a time of rapid growth in the enterprise storage market, which grew by 34 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of this year, according to figures from International Data Corp. The company reckons that its object storage appliances have played a big part in this growth by helping enterprises to create a kind of “hyperscale fabric” that entwines their storage assets and allows data to be pooled and shared in locations across the globe.

The company has recently seen the pendulum swinging back from the earlier trend of customers moving large amounts of storage to the cloud. “On-premises has grown fantastically in the past year,” Toor said, citing a recent IDC report that said 80 percent of cloud adopters have moved one or more workloads back on-premises from the public cloud environment or plan to do so.

Cloudian boasts several big name customers, including “two of the top five Formula One teams, a U.S. national research lab, an online travel market leader, a top-three pharmaceutical company, 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.” The company’s growth rate is more than doubling each year and it counts about 240 customers today, about triple the number at the time of its last funding round six months ago, Toor said.

“Global 2000 customers in media, automotive, manufacturing, healthcare, and government look to Cloudian to manage their rapidly growing information assets, a trend that we see only accelerating,” said Edouard Hervey, managing director at Goldman Sachs.

Following the earlier funding round in February, Cloudian said it was getting into the “composable infrastructure” game, which involves virtualizing compute, storage and network resources and delivering them as services for customers so they don’t need to worry about managing their infrastructure. This service is offered on a consumption-based pricing model.

However, the composable offering hasn’t been a big part of the sales picture yet, Toor said. Only two customers have signed on since the initiative was announced in February. Toor attributed the slow start to a long sales cycle and the fact that deals are being customized to each customer. “We’re intending to make it more of shrink-wrapped program, but for now it’s custom fit,” Toor said.

This year, Cloudian acquired an Italian software-defined storage firm called Infinity Storage that enables it to offer an integrated file and object-based storage system that can consolidate all unstructured data types into a highly scalable storage pool.

Cloudian said it would use the new funds to expand its worldwide sales and marketing efforts and add new hires to its product engineering team.

With reporting by Paul Gillin

Image: Fotocitizen/Pixabay