Tintri just closed a healthy $125 million Series F funding round which it will use to build out channel and marketing activities around its storage appliance. This brings total funding to $260 million as the company heads for a planned IPO next year, said CEO Ken Klein.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Tintri sells what it calls “VM-aware” storage appliances that use both super-fast flash storage media and slower, less pricey disk storage and then figuring out which media to use which data.
It competes with new-look storage competitors like Nimble Storage (NMBL) and Tegile, but Klein said the company most often competes with NetApp (NTAP), a more established player.
The sales pitch of these new companies is that by supporting virtualization, they can pack more data into less hardware. Customers include Comcast, Chevron, and 50 or so cloud service providers, Klein said.
Tintri supports all the major hypervisors including VMware ESX, Microsoft(MSFT)Hyper-V and Red Hat(RHT)KVM. Support for the Xen hypervisor is on the roadmap.
Klein would not comment on whether the company is a unicorn or “sub-unicorn,” aka whether it’s valued at $1 billion or just under $1 billion, but he did claim triple revenue growth year over year. He did not provide revenue numbers.
This round was led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk, with contributions from existing backers Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Menlo Ventures and NEA.
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