The rapid adoption of software-defined storage in the enterprise is drawing interest from all kinds of investors hoping to capitalize on the trend.

Among them is Pathfinder, the venture capital arm of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which on Thursday contributed to a $21.5 million financing round into Hedvig Inc. as part of this gold rush. The technology giant was joined by Singaporean government fund EDBI and several returning backers including Vertex Ventures, the firm that led Hedvig’s previous $18 million raise back in 2015.

Their investment should give the startup a much-needed boost amid the fierce competition in the storage market. Its entry into the race is the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform, a software system that lets companies keep their information on disk and flash drives attached to low-cost commodity servers. The offering can turn the individual machines in a deployment into a unified pool of capacity that provides the same kind of capabilities as the expensive proprietary arrays Hedvig wants to replace.

According to the startup, its feature set covers all the key items on storage administrators’ checklist. The system compresses data to save capacity, keeps frequently accessed records on flash for the sake of improving response times and provides a host of automation capabilities to top it all off. Plus, companies with more demanding requirements can plug the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform into third-party management tools to augment its native features.

As for the data kept on the system, it’s made available through a specialized proxy that can expose records in all three of the formats employed by enterprise applications. As a result, the startup said, the platform lends itself to a wide variety of use cases. It can be deployed behind the firewall to support traditional on-premises workloads, or set up on one of the major infrastructure-as-a-service platforms and power modern web services.

Hedvig will invest the capital from this week’s round into further expanding its value proposition with a particular emphasis on providing better cloud support. At the same time, the startup plans to step up customer acquisition efforts in the fast-growing Asia Pacific region, a push that will be led by veteran sales executive Ediz Ertekin. He was named as Hedvig’s new senior vice president of sales and field operations in conjunction with the funding announcement.

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