Startup Kaminario has just announced a $53 million funding round that will fuel its push into the growing flash storage market. The new round means it’s raised a considerable $128 million, making it one of the best-funded flash startups around.

And Kaminario has actually been around for a while. Founded in 2008, it’s going up against the likes of Pure Storage Inc., as well as enterprise storage giants like EMC Corp. It says it’s planning to use its cash infusion to add new features to its hardware, and will also step up is marketing, sales and support efforts in a bid to gain market share.

Although its products aren’t too dissimilar from the all-flash storage offered by Pure Storage, what sets Kaminario apart is its proprietary software which powers solid-state drives and servers built by Samsung and SanDisk.

“We provide an all-flash solution at a lower cost than what we call hybrids –a bit of flash, a bit of hard drive and a bit of cloud,” said Dani Golan, the company’s founder and CEO, to TechCrunch.

But price isn’t the only area where Kaminario is competitive – it also offers the ability to scale up and scale out. Golan explains that when companies need extra storage they usually go and buy more storage arrays, but that means they often buy more capacity than they really need. Rather than doing this, companies can instead use Kaminario’s software controllers to link all of their Kaminario hardware together and better distribute resources. When customers need more storage, they simply add more software controllers and “the operating system will identify them and add them to the pool and rebalance the system,” Golan told GigaOM.

If it sounds like software-defined storage, that’s because it – the only real difference is Kaminario’s software only works with Kaminario hardware.

Clearly Kaminario’s new backers believe the company has what it takes to compete in a very tough market. Gartner put Kaminario in third place in its most recent all-flash array critical capabilities report, behind Pure Storage and SolidFire Inc., but comfortably ahead of legacy giants like EMC, Hewlett-Packard Co. and others.

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