Object storage demand is growing; Cloudian has gained $23 million in funding for its growth as its business, now at the breakeven stage, notches up four customer wins through HPE’s GreenLake subscription service.
Cloudian claims its geo-distributed, S3-compatible HyperStore is used for AI data lake storage and its experiencing an year-on-year 30 percent increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR). A Hyperstore data lake stores and feeds data to large language models and works with AI and data analytics tools such as PyTorch, Tensor Flow, Kafka, and Druid. Cloudian has a partnership with HPE where HyperStore is sold as a GreenLake service.
Michael Tso, Cloudian CEO and co-founder, issued a statement. claiming Cloudian was experiencing “substantial growth as enterprises increasingly leverage Cloudian’s AI-ready data lake technology to create insights and advance their AI initiatives. Achieving breakeven alongside this growth marks a pivotal moment in our financial journey.”
The funding comes from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and its exec director, Stanley Hua, said: “We are delighted to support Cloudian in the next phase of growth and to help the company continue delivering exceptional value to its customers.” Cloudian will use the cash to pay for product development and sales and marketing initiatives.
Cloudian was founded in 2011 and has raised some $256 million funding with $60 million added to its coffers last year.
Customers gained through GreenLake include a global retailer where Cloudian is helping its Splunk data analytics infrastructure. This retailer, which could be Carrefour, has more than 200,000 staff, and switched its backend Splunk storage from HPE 3PAR/Primera to Hyperstore, lowering its storage costs by 51 percent.
A second GreenLake Cloud customer is cloud service provider Verinext, which provides fully managed backup, disaster recovery and storage services using Cloudian’s AI data lake. We understand two more Cloudian service provider deals are to be announced shortly.
HyperStore supports the AWS Mountpoint facility, meaning applications running in AWS can issue file IO requests to HyperStore running in AWS. That means AI apps running in AWS could use HyperStore data lake storage, pumping data to GPU instances. With Hammerspace’s Global Data Environment now supporting S3 it could be used to provide a high-performance bridge between on-premises HyperStore and NVIDIA GPU servers.
Cloudian’s Hyperstore software is available from the AWS Marketplace, HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, and from Cloudian’s worldwide roster of resellers. The company has relationships with data analytics vendors such as Snowflake, Teradata, Microsoft SQL Server, VMware Greenplum, and Vertica.
