Q2 Hits the Brakes on M&A While Venture Funding Places Some Big Bets
Storage M&A:
- 2017 started strong with 10 deals totaling $1.8B in Q1 but in Q2, buyers hit the brakes with just 4 deals announced
- The trend of private equity firms acquiring storage companies continues as Quantum Partners acquired Violin, Insight Venture Partners acquired Spanning Cloud and private equity owned Arcserve acquired Fastarchiver
- Meanwhile NetApp quietly acquired PlexiStor, which is a three-year-old Israel-based startup that has developed software to dramatically improve data access speeds by altering the way data is handled in-memory. NetApp is looking to the future as persistent memories emerge, especially with Micron and Intel’s 3D XPoint.
Storage Venture Funding:
- Q2 2017 storage funding was strong at $387M across 7 rounds with an average round size of $55.3M
- Rubrik’s $180M 4th round was the largest this year to date, bringing its total equity raised to $292M. Rubrik is disrupting the data protection market by offering data protection appliances that are replacing more costly and complex legacy back-up and disaster recovery platforms.
- Cohesity raised $90M as it ramps up sales and marketing followed next by Tegile who raised $33M.
- Qumulo added $30M to its war chest as it goes to battle in the highly competitive scale-out NAS market.
- Portworx, a storage specialist for containers, brought in $20M as the hype around containers remains strong with the promise of larger use cases and deployments just around the corner
Contact John Rotchford at john@sasillc.com for the full report.