Israeli cloud storage processor startup Pliops could be a company worth watching after it landed a $30 million round of funding today led by Intel Capital, State of Mind Ventures and Viola Ventures.

The Series B round, which brings Pliops’ total funding to $40 million, also saw the participation of strategic investors Western Digital Capital and Xilinx Inc.

Pliops is being backed for its new storage processor technology that’s optimized for cloud databases running on disaggregated NAND Flash systems, such as Apache Cassandra and MySQL. The technology, which is still under development, enables these workloads to scale more efficiently with what Pliops says is a 90 percent reduction in compute load and a 20 percent reduction in network traffic.

The company also claims a 50 times improvement in latency and 10 times boost in application throughput, resulting in much greater performance alongside lower costs. The offering uses application programming interfaces to integrate with major cloud databases.

Pliops said these kinds of capabilities will be necessary because of what it calls a “data explosion” and the increasing requirements of technologies such as artificial intelligence.

“Businesses must scale their infrastructures in the face of skyrocketing data volumes,” said Pliops co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Uri Beitler. “Pliops’ technology transforms storage so that organizations achieve more consistent, readily scaled performance with a simplified software stack.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Pliops’ technology was promising because enterprises are always in search of better performance to boost their newer applications.

“Putting software in silicon is a proven and successful way of doing it, and today it is Pliops’ turn to accelerate storage,” Mueller said. “When data is the new oil, storage matters.”

Pliops said it will use the cash to accelerate the development of its processor technology and expand its teams in China, Israel and the U.S. The company is planning to debut its storage processor later this year.

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