Storage software startup WekaIO Inc. today revealed that it has raised $31.7 million in funding from a who’s who of the technology industry, including among others Nvidia Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Western Digital Corp.

The investment brings the startup’s total raised to over $66 million. WekaIO will use the capital to widen the adoption of its Matrix file system, which is designed to speed up workloads such as machine learning models and analytics applications that process a lot of data.

Matrix is a software abstraction layer that can turn flash drives inside a cluster of on-premises servers or an Amazon Web Services environment into a unified storage pool. It manages all the logistics involved in enabling applications to retrieve records and store newly-generated data. What sets Matrix apart from other file systems that provide similar features is the speed at which it processes large volumes of information.

According to WekaIO, the software can be used to build storage environments with capacity to hold trillions of individual files and perform tens of millions of data operations every second. A recent benchmark test conducted by VI4IO, a storage industry body, put Matrix’s performance ahead of more established file systems such as IBM Corp.’s Spectrum Scale and Lustre.

This speed is the fruit of some unusual design choices. Matrix is built to run on Linux servers, but also installs its own custom real-time operating system to speed up processing. Low-level tasks such as transmitting input and output instructions to a machine’s flash drives are likewise handled by specially developed software components inside Matrix.

Beyond its high speeds, the platform provides management features to help with day-to-day operations. Administrators can spread out their companies’ data across multiple locations to protect against outages, create backups and offload infrequently accessed information to cheaper storage hardware in order to free up resources.

The broad feature set offered by Matrix likely isn’t the only factor that convinced WekaIO’s new investors to pour $31.7 million into its war chest. The startup claims that its revenue more than quadrupled last year, momentum that the new capital will put it in a better position to maintain. 

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