Press Release

Excelero Receives Strategic Investment from Western Digital, Capping Five Successive Quarters of Strong Growth

New funds and Western Digital’s technical collaboration enable Excelero NVMesh® to redefine web-scale storage through its shared NVMe at local performance

SAN JOSE, CA August 16, 2018 – Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, announced that it received strategic investment funds from Western Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC). This investment represents the fourth strategic player to invest in Excelero, including Micron and Qualcomm, and brings the total VC funds invested in Excelero to $35 million. Excelero will use the funds to accelerate its go-to-market activities worldwide.

Separate from the funding, Excelero and Western Digital have begun technical collaboration activities whereby the two firms are offering web-scale storage solutions to some of the world’s largest, most demanding enterprises and service providers. By harnessing Excelero’s award-winning NVMesh® software-defined block storage solution along with Western Digital’s NVMe SSD hardware, the companies are delivering unrivaled storage scalability, performance, and agility.
@ExceleroStorage gets strategic funding from @WD_Capital, technical collaboration with @westerndigital as its web-scale deployments take off #NVMe #NVMe-oF http://bit.ly/2BdhgxB Click To Tweet
“Excelero has developed a software-defined block storage solution designed to redefine storage for web-scale applications. The company is addressing an important and growing challenge associated with traditional architectures and we are pleased to support their efforts,” said Mark Long, president, Western Digital Capital. “Western Digital is committed to providing a variety of options to customers to solve the increasing challenge of managing AI, real-time analytics and other Fast Data applications. Our new OpenFlexTM architecture and products allow for the independent scaling of compute, storage and network resources, with orchestration and management enabled through an open API. We look forward to working with Excelero to integrate and advance our technologies to create even more powerful solutions for customers in data-centric businesses.”

The Western Digital Capital funding follows an extremely strong Q2 2018 for Excelero where revenue growth topped 50% Q/Q and where results represented the fifth consecutive quarter of 50% Q/Q revenue growth or better since the company’s first customer revenue, prior to its March 2017 launch. With numerous web-scale customer deployments across multiple high-growth verticals – media & entertainment, government and Web & Cloud – Excelero is experiencing the rapid adoption that speaks to the appeal of its hardware-agnostic approach. As more enterprises embrace web-scale architectures, Excelero is delivering the agility, ready scalability and efficiency from which to easily grow their operations.

“Analytics, machine learning, advanced visualization and AI are driving organizations to embrace new scale-out IT architectures, and they can’t do it with traditional storage architectures,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder of Excelero. “We’re honored to receive this strategic funding from Western Digital Capital, and to embark on a technical collaboration with Western Digital. We look forward to accelerating our go-to-market efforts together as we drive innovation in data center technologies.”

About Flash Memory Summit

Flash Memory Summit, produced by Conference ConCepts, showcases the mainstream applications, key technologies and leading vendors that are driving the multi-billion dollar non-volatile memory and SSD markets. FMS is now the world’s largest event featuring the trends, innovations and influencers driving the adoption of Flash Memory in demanding enterprise storage applications, as well as in smartphones, tablets, and mobile and embedded systems.

About Excelero

Excelero enables enterprises and service providers to design scale-out storage infrastructures leveraging standard servers and high-performance flash storage. Founded in 2014 by a team of storage veterans and inspired by the tech giants’ shared-nothing architectures for web-scale applications, the company has designed a software-defined block storage solution that meets performance and scalability requirements of the largest web-scale and enterprise applications.

With Excelero’s NVMesh, customers can build distributed, high-performance server SAN for mixed application workloads. Customers benefit from the performance of local flash, with the convenience of centralized storage while avoiding proprietary hardware lock-in and reducing the overall storage TCO. The solution has been deployed for hyper-scale Industrial IoT services, machine learning applications and massive-scale simulation visualization.

Follow us on Twitter @Excelerostorage, on LinkedIn or visit www.excelero.com

Press Contacts:

Tom Leyden
Vice President of Corporate Marketing
Cell US +1 818 919 8478
press@excelero.com

Federica Monsone
EMEA Media Contact (A3 Communications)
+44 (0) 1252 875 203
fred.monsone@a3communications.co.uk

Mary Kae Marinac
US Media Contact
phone 978-685-3136
mkm@mkmarinac.com