Composable data center infrastructure startup Liqid Inc. closed on a $100 million funding round today aimed at helping it fulfill its mission of bringing cloud-like speed, flexibility and efficiency to on-premises data centers.

Lightrock and affiliates of DH Capital co-led the Series C round, which also saw participation from current investors Panorama Point Partners and Iron Gate Capital.

Liqid has built an artificial intelligence-based software platform called Liqid Matrix that’s used by companies to manage their on-premises data center resources more efficiently. It’s a fast-growing player in what’s often known as the composable infrastructure business.

Composable infrastructure refers to the decoupling of resources from the hardware they reside on, pooling them into a form easily accessible from anywhere in the data center, and then provisioning workloads with exactly the amount of resources they need via software. So compute, storage and network devices are all treated as pools of resources that can be chopped up as needed.

The approach is similar to public cloud in that resource capacity is requested and provisioned from shared capacity, the difference being that composable infrastructure sits on-premises in an enterprise data center.

Liqid argues that composable infrastructure is key to improving business agility. It points out that on-premises data center architectures are configured far too rigidly and that they’re no longer able to accommodate the demands of modern, AI-centric workloads.

With Liqid, companies can get the most out of their data center resources, while simultaneously reducing power consumption and cooling requirements. Liqid makes some impressive claims, saying its software can boost data center utilization rates by a factor of two or three when compared to traditional static architectures. So these are not trivial gains, but rather a significant boost in data center efficiency.

Liqid’s claims are validated by an impressive customer list that includes Dell Technologies Inc., Nvidia Corp., Broadcom Corp., Intel Corp. and the U.S. Department of Defense.

“Liqid software enables enterprises and data center operators to do more with less,” said DH Capital Partner and Managing Director Marty Friedman. “Liqid’s software and solutions support ongoing growth and productive innovation for public and private organizations alike, while also reducing waste and inefficiency.”

Liqid said it will use today’s funding to scale its operations to meet growing demand for the Liqid Matrix platform. To do that, Liqid intends to expand its sales, marketing, operations and support teams. The money will also help Liqid to accelerate its software development roadmap and ensure it remains at the forefront of innovation in the composable infrastructure market.

For all the talk of information technology trending to the cloud, the fact is there are still an awful lot of enterprise data centers up and running and many more are being built, Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE.

“To help enterprise managing these server resources more efficiently, composable architectures are becoming critical and it is good to see more capital flowing in the space,” he said. “Liquid is making the right moves, eyeing further global expansion and putting R&D high on its investment list.”

Image: Liqid