Tegile Systems Inc. is making the most out of the investor interest in the flash storage market.

The array maker today announced that it has raised $33 million in funding from Western Digital Corp., Meritech Capital and several other returning backers.

Their decision to double down on their bets comes hot on the heels of Tegile marking a 110 percent year-over-year increase in revenue, beating the rate at which the flash storage market as a whole is growing. The investor consortium is apparently optimistic that the company can maintain this momentum on the back of the new products that it has introduced in recent quarters.

Most recently, Tegile launched a new iteration of its flagship array family called the T4000 that includes both hybrid and all-flash models. The company claims that the systems pack up to 2.3 times more memory than the previous generation appliances while providing the ability to handle up to 1.7 times more I/O operations per second. The top-end model, which is known as the T4800, makes it possible to include as much as 1.2 petabytes of effective flash capacity in a deployment.

Tegile will spend a portion of today’s funding on further enhancing its product lineup. The company must aggressively invest in feature development if it’s to fend off the increasing competition from rivaling flash array makers.

Tegile is facing off both against established players such as Dell Technologies Inc. and Pure Storage Inc. as well as fellow upstarts hoping to shake up the industry’s balance of power. Among them is Kaminario Inc., which raised a hefty $75 million in funding earlier this year to drive demand for its all-flash arrays. The investment was led by Hong Kong-based private equity firm Waterwood Group and saw the participation of several other big name investors including Sequoia.

The fierce competition among flash array maker is helping to create a significant amount of industry momentum. In today’s funding announcement, Tegile cited a recent Gartner report that estimated all-flash systems will generate revenues of $10.4 billion by 2020 to account for 52 percent of the overall external storage market.

Image: Tegile