Pliops raises US$30m to ‘transform’ data centre infrastructure
With ambitions to expand its operations around the world, data center infrastructure solutions provider Pliops has announced a successful round of funding.
The company has received a US$30 million Series B funding led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, with participation from all Series A investors including Intel Capital, State of Mind Ventures (SOMV) and Viola Ventures, along with strategic investors Western Digital Capital and Xilinx Inc.
Pliops asserts it intends to use the funds to accelerate development of its storage processor technology for cloud storage and database applications, in addition to the expansion of its teams in China, Israel, and the US.
Recently-appointed president and chief business officer Steve Fingerhut, based in San Jose, will spearhead global expansion and oversee the company's product debut planned for mid-2019.
The company boasts an executive team featuring industry leaders from the likes of Amazon, Apple, Intel, and Samsung, and continues to develop technology with the goal to solve the scalability challenges raised by the cloud data explosion and the increasing data requirements of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.
Pliops quotes a study from Gartner that reveals stored data is growing much faster than current data center approaches can scale to efficiently manage, creating a storage bottleneck that impacts performance across the entire cloud data center market.
The September 2018 report projects the worldwide public cloud services market to grow 17.3 percent this year to reach $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018.
Pliops claims with eight core patents pending to date, its storage processor allows cloud databases like MySQL or Cassandra deployed on disaggregated Flash to scale more efficiently via a 90% reduction in compute load, a 20x reduction in network traffic, a 50x improvement to latency and over 10x application throughput.
"Pliops is solving a critical problem for database and storage architects – and doing it in a way that is both elegantly simple and amazingly efficient," says Softbank Ventures Asia CEO and managing partner JP Lee.
"There is tremendous pent-up demand worldwide for solutions that enable next-generation data centers to perform and scale more efficiently, particularly in large cloud providers' environments. Pliops' architecture enables order of magnitude improvements in performance and even greater price/performance gains. We're delighted to welcome the company to the SoftBank Ventures Asia portfolio."
Intel Corporation senior vice president and Intel Capital president Wendell Brooks says Pliops is a company to watch in the coming years.
"Pliops' core technology helps to accelerate the cloud and AI workloads that are driving the next wave of innovations," says Brooks.
"Intel is investing in numerous technologies to meet the rapidly growing storage and processing needs of the most challenging applications. This investment in Pliops advances Intel's vision to develop the most efficient, scalable data center solutions."
Pliops co-founder and CEO Uri Beitler says the company is excited for what the future holds.
"Pliops' technology transforms storage so that organisations achieve more consistent, readily-scaled performance with a simplified software stack. We are proud to have achieved the backing of such esteemed leading investors and to see early market traction. We look forward to sharing more about our flagship product in the coming months," concludes Beitler.
