Pavilion Data, supplying very fast storage hardware based on network switch architecture, has gained renewed funding — $45 million of it — after recently-appointed CEO Dario Zamarian led the company to double its new customer growth year-on-year in 2021.
Update. CPMO name added. 21 Jan 2022.
The company says it significantly increased deployments within federal agencies and increased penetration into analytics use cases in Fortune 500 companies — including a top-20 banking institution, a top credit agency, and one of the largest hedge funds in the country. It now positions itself as an analytics and AI accelerator because its storage — the HyperParallel Data Platform — is so fast, and because nearly 80 per cent of all deployments in 2021 were to accelerate analytics, legacy and next-generation ML, and streaming applications.
A Zamarian quote for the funding news read: “Pavilion is proving its market acceptance across a broad range of industry verticals as an analytics acceleration platform for legacy and next-generation applications.”
The company last raised $25 million in a C-round in 2019. This latest round is not being called a D-round although, in a sequential sense, that is what it is. It takes total funding since Pavilion was started up in 2014 to $107 million.
This latest round was led by Kleiner Perkins and Artiman Ventures. All existing investors participated in the funding — including Korea Investment Partners, SK Telecom Ventures, Taiwania Capital, Tyche Partners, DAG Ventures, and RPS Ventures. They were joined by new investors Mirae Asset, Liberty Street Advisors, and Gaingels.
Christian Munafo, chief investment officer and portfolio manager at Liberty Street Advisors, provided a quote: “Demands for data are growing rapidly, so Pavilion’s ability to provide high-speed data ingest feeding an analytics pipeline aligns it perfectly to the reality of today’s market. Plus, its ultra-low latency keeps data flowing in high-performance-database and high-performance-virtualisation workloads.”
Zamarian said “2021 saw the company grow its employee base by 50 per cent across all functions.” He hired four new execs in the year:
- SVP of software development Anil Virmani in Dec 2021;
- VP of operations Chethan Bachamada also in Dec 2021;
- VP of marketing Lynn Orlando in Dec 2021 as well;
- Chief Marketing and Product Officer Shridar Subramanian (ex-Arcserve CMO) Jan 2022.
We are told that 75 per cent of Pavilion’s 2020 customers repurchased in 2021. That year saw the company opening new sales offices in Atlanta, Boston, and London, and addressing the US public sector by opening a sales division focused on federal government customers to support its existing presence in the federal space. Pavilion said it also made inroads in the life sciences, financial, and media and entertainment industry verticals.
In 2022, Zamarian and his team have to show the investors that their faith is justified. They have the cash to strengthen the company’s activities, including product development. The HyperParallel Data Platform does very well serving data to Nvidia GPU servers using the GPUDirect protocol, and its hardware and software can be improved further with the new cash. We can surely expect product announcements this year — for example, the possible use of third-generation Xeon controller CPUs.
Pavilion might also reveal its thinking about the use of public cloud capabilities. It should be an interesting year.
