Data platform startup Lightbits Labs Ltd. announced today that it has raised $42 million in new funding to fuel the growth of its Lightbits Cloud Data Platform, including investments in innovation and expansion.

The growth capital round was led by Atreides Management and included J.P. Morgan, Valor Equity Partners, O.G. Tech, Richard Li, existing investors and others. Including the new round, the company has raised more than $100 million to date.

Founded in 2016, Lightbits Labs offers high-performance block storage that it says is scalable and cost-efficient for any cloud, adding that the Cloud Data Platform delivers modern data centers efficiency, simplicity and agility.

Lightbits’ service uses NVMe-over-TCP, a protocol designed by the company that provides high performance with reduced development costs and design complexity. NVMe is a nonvolatile Memory Express, a storage access and transport protocol for next-generation solid-state drives that deliver high throughput and fast response times. NVMe/TCP is built on top of the TCP/IP stack to enable efficient and streamlined block storage, optimized for multicore application servers.

NVMe/TCP is said to differ from other NVMe over Fabrics solutions, which require Fibre Channel or RDMA via the RoCE protocol by eliminating storage complexities. Lightbits says NVMe/TCP is simple, flexible and easy to deploy at large scale on ubiquitous TCP/IP networks, requiring no special hardware, NICs, drivers or hypervisors on the storage nodes.

The company’s technology providers disaggregated, composable block storage for any cloud, whether private, public or edge. Lightbits works with existing operating systems, networking and hardware to simplify storage for hybrid multicloud implementations on bare-metal, VMware, Kubernetes, or OpenStack environments.

The native NMVe/TCP architecture, coupled with innovative Intelligent Flash Management, is said to solve the complexity and high-cost problems endemic in data centers today.

Lightbits says it has seen strong growth, with its service used by Fortune 1000 organizations. They include several of the world’s largest financial services companies, e-commerce providers and communication service providers in response to demand for fast, resilient and secure cloud services that maximize profitability and improve margins.

“There is tremendous pressure on CSPs and IT organizations with private clouds to profitably keep pace with growing business demand while providing fast, resilient and secure services,” Avigdor Willenz, co-founder and chairman of Lightbits Labs, said in a statement. “Lightbits invented NVMe/TCP and has led the way in defining a cloud-native storage architecture that is simple, agile and efficient.”

Image: Lightbits Labs