UPDATED 15:02 EDT / FEBRUARY 17 2014

Confirmed: Fusion-io founders back with a vengeance : bag total of $63M for stealth startup

hyperscale network infrastructureFusion-io co-founders David Flynn and Rick White have not been idle since their controversial departure from the storage drive maker last May. Four months after handing over the reins to new CEO Shane Robison, the executives secured $50 million for their next venture, an emerging provider of software-defined storage (SDS) solutions called Primary Data.  Now more money on top of previous news.

According to our sources the pair bagged another $13 million earlier this month, a sum that we learned has since increased to $63 million in this round of financing their Series B.  The round was led by existing backers Mercato Partners, and included all other original investors, namely Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pelion Venture Partners.  Other reports note that firm secured $60m in Series B but SiliconANGLE has confirmed a total of $63 million.  The conflicting reports might be the missing data on the Series A for $3 million.  Either way $63 million is a lot of cabbage for the new startup.

Primary Data is keeping things under wraps until its scheduled to launch later this year, but in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, Flynn revealed that his team is working on a software-solution similar to EMC’s ViPR platform.

“The company is developing software–though it actually will come bundled on standard server hardware–that essentially connects all those pools of data together, offering what Flynn calls a “unified file directory namespace” visible to all servers in company computer rooms–as well as those “in the cloud” that might be operated by external service companies.”

“Primary Data develops software to enable enterprises to manage unstructured data with improved performance and scalability,” explains Wikibon co-founder and Chief Analyst Dave Vellante. The information explosion is outpacing legacy storage solutions, driving the large organizations at the forefront of this revolution to embrace new software-defined architectures that provide the ability to rapidly scale capacity with minimum overhead.

SiliconANGLE CEO John Furrier thinks that the pair are doing something in software on a big scale.  “David Flynn is a genius and his vision around software hyperscale is unique and I believe will turn out to be very relevant in the software cloud meets open compute market” says Furrier.

{Editors Note: we orginally reported a total of $120 million in financing but that was incorrect.  We have confirmed it was $63 million.}

photo credit: Daniel*1977 via photopin cc

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