WekaIO ramps up its funding to $140 million

Scale-out parallel filesystem supplier WekaIO has raised $73 million in a fourth-round, taking total funding to $140 million.

Update: Jan 6. Not a D-round. Feb 7; Cisco removed as an investor.

Hitachi Ventures led this round accompanied by a spread of strategic investors, including HPE, NVIDIA, Micron, and financial investors including MoreTech Ventures, Ibex Investors, and Key 1 Capital. WekaIO will use the funds to accelerate go-to-market activities, operations, and engineering. The round would be a D-round sequentially but we have been told it is not actually a D-round – which means it could be an extension of the previous C-round or something different. Weka’s valuation for this round is unknown.

Liran Zvibel

Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder and CEO of WEKA – it now calls itself WEKA rather than WekaIO – issued a statement: “The Global 1000s are now aggressively integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning practices and technology into their core business processes, creating new products and services that were impossible to even imagine previously.

“GPUs and accelerated computing technologies are rapidly replacing traditional CPU compute at 100-1000 times performance, shifting the AI bottleneck from CPU access to data access, and creating a huge market opportunity for WEKA’s modern Data Platform for AI. … Our latest round will enable WEKA to deliver better and faster outcomes to more customers and improved integration with our ecosystem.”

Gal Gitter, Partner and Managing Director at Ibex Investors, is utterly convinced about WEKA’s relevance, as you would expect having put money in. His announcement quote stands out.

Gitter said: “The sheer speed in which we see the Enterprise AI market is developing is staggering. We are seeing a massive increase in the use of AI/ML and HPC applications that are driving new products and services for enterprises. However, supporting these applications at scale entails really difficult storage challenges or tradeoffs. This is where WEKA comes in, enabling a tremendous acceleration for enterprises’ AI applications: from ingestion to cleansing to storage. WEKA has been adding customers and partners at an explosive pace, and we could not be more excited to back them. Simply put, if your enterprise is serious about AI – you need WEKA.”

WEKA was founded in 2013 and its most recent prior round was a $31.7 million C-round in 2019. It reported hyper growth in December at the end of 2021. The new funding helps keep the momentum up at the start of 2022.