Hybrid cloud data management firm Cloudian Inc. said today it has closed on a $60 million round of funding that brings its total amount raised to $233 million.

The round was led by Digital Alpha and saw participation from Eight Roads Ventures Japan, INCJ, Intel Capital, Japan Post Investment Corp., Silicon Valley Bank, Tinshed Asia, Wilson Sonsini Investments and other strategic investors.

Alongside the funding, Cloudian announced it’s hiring industry veteran Bob Griswold as its new chairman. Griswold previously held roles such as the vice president of strategy and planning at Hewlett-Packard Co., senior vice president of product line management at Seagate Technology Inc. and vice president and chief strategist for enterprise, commercial and small business at Cisco Systems Inc.

Cloudian is a data management startup that sells software that enterprises can use to manage business data, recover from outages and reduce the risk of ransomware attacks. The software, called HyperStore, transforms virtually any compute platform, including standard servers, virtual machines, containers or public cloud, into a pool of Amazon S3 application programming interface-compatible object storage resources.

These can be co-located with both data sources and data consumers and scale to hundreds of petabytes if necessary. In this way, Cloudian’s architecture creates a global federation of local storage assets that can easily integrated with any public cloud platform to consolidate data management.

The company also produces its own, specialized object storage appliances that can be installed in on-premises data centers and hooked up to the cloud. These appliances, pre-integrated with its data management software, provide up to 70% better cost-efficiency than traditional storage systems, the company claims.

Cloudian’s services also extend to HyperIQ, which is a monitoring service for HyperStore that enables customers to identify operational issues and suspicious activity in their environments. Meanwhile, HyperBalance is a load balancer that works by evenly distributing application data requests within HyperStore environments to optimize performance.

The company said today’s investment will accelerate its hybrid cloud platform capabilities and prepare it for a new phase of growth. It cites data from Gartner Inc. that shows how 95% of new workloads deployed by 2025 will employ cloud-native technology. This, it says, will result in growing demand for a multicloud infrastructure that provides a unified data management platform for these modern applications, just as Cloudian provides.

“Cloudian is exceptionally well-positioned to capitalize on today’s transition to cloud-native technologies,” the new chairman said. “I believe strongly in the company’s strategy and its enterprise-proven platform; so much so, that I personally invested in the current funding round.”

Image: Cloudian