Hedvig Closes $18M Series B to Aggressively Pursue Leadership in Software-Defined Storage Market as Demand for Data Center Modernization Heats Up

Vertex Ventures Leads Round; Cloud Pioneer In Sik Rhee Joins Board of Directors


SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 1, 2015) - Hedvig, the company with distributed systems DNA that is reinventing software-defined storage, today announced the close of an $18 million Series B funding round. The investment was led by Vertex Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Atlantic Bridge. Vertex Ventures General Partner In Sik Rhee also joined Hedvig's Board of Directors. With approximately $30.5 million in financing to date, the company will use the latest round of funding to fuel rapid global expansion and address the demands of its growing customer base.

With data center modernization currently considered the second most important IT initiative for enterprises* and data growing at 10 times the rate of storage budgets**, enterprises require solutions that enable them to immediately adapt to evolving data, application and user requirements. Designed for change and built to scale, the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform combines the flexibility of cloud and commodity infrastructure to reimagine the economics of enterprise data storage and management. Companies can easily add more capabilities as their needs evolve without having to reconfigure their storage architecture.

"When I first met Avinash two years ago, he impressed me with his vision for reinventing data storage by looking at it through a distributed systems lens. Avinash has built a great team and groundbreaking technology at Hedvig," said In Sik Rhee, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. "IT buyers are tired of being constrained by the last generation of hardware. As a new venture firm, we are focused on partnering with game changing companies like Hedvig. A fresh distributed systems approach and hybrid cloud capabilities make it well-poised to redefine storage and lead this emerging category that we believe is the future of enterprise storage."

Prior to founding Hedvig, Lakshman is credited with building some of the most successful distributed systems in the world, including Amazon Dynamo, the foundation of the NoSQL movement, and Apache Cassandra for Facebook. By leveraging the distributed systems approach at Hedvig, the company will deliver the power of Amazon and Facebook-like infrastructure to any enterprise data center.

"Avinash and I worked together at Facebook where he built a reputation for tackling transformational problems. Apache Cassandra, which Avinash invented, has been lauded for its robust design and inimitable scalability -- attributes Hedvig brings to modern storage for modern business," said Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. "Hedvig's product initially seems like sci-fi, the good kind that leaves you wanting more."

"We've identified the potential in a broken and fragmented storage market, and are not only looking to bring software-defined storage mainstream, but fundamentally change how companies store and manage data," said Avinash Lakshman, founder and CEO of Hedvig. "Riding the wave of momentum from our recent company launch, this new investment round further validates our technology and approach, and will fuel our unwavering commitment to be the leading force of innovation in software-defined storage."

For more information and a demonstration of how Hedvig is redefining software-defined storage, please visit http://www.hedviginc.com. Hedvig executives will also be presenting at MSST on June 3rd in Santa Clara, and at DockerCon on June 22-23 in San Francisco.

* "Solution Showcase - Hedvig: Evolved Software-defined Storage," Enterprise Strategy Group, March 2015
** "Meet Evolving Business Demands With Software-Defined Storage," Forrester Research, Inc., March 2015

About Hedvig
Hedvig is re-architecting software-defined storage. Hedvig accelerates data to value by collapsing disparate storage systems into a single platform, creating a virtualized pool that provisions storage with a few clicks, scales to petabytes and runs seamlessly in both private and public clouds. Built by software engineers of the world's largest and most successful distributed systems, the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is the only software-defined storage incorporating true distributed systems capabilities. Built to keep pace with scale-out applications and the velocity of change in today's business climate, the Hedvig platform gets better and smarter as the system scales, transforming commodity hardware into the most advanced storage solution available today. Customers such as Intuit, Dovilo, Van Dijk and Paul Hastings LLP use the Hedvig platform to transform their storage from a box where data resides to a fundamental business enabler. www.hedviginc.com

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