Isilon Systems’ Sujal Patel part of Series A financing round.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: The Seattle-based company Igneous Systems – co-founded by CEO Kiran Bhageshpur – specializing in data center infrastructures, has closed a $23.6 million Series A financing round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures and Isilon Systems co-founder Sujal Patel.
The company had previously raised a $3M seed round led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Redpoint Ventures. The company will use the funding for product development and for significant expansion of its engineering and leadership teams. As part of the funding, Ron Bernal, venture partner at NEA, joins the board of directors, said a press release by Igneous.
“With heavyweights like Microsoft, Amazon, F5 Networks, and EMC Isilon, Seattle is becoming a tech mecca in its own right, particularly when it comes to cloud technologies,” said Matt Mcllwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group, in a statement. “Igneous brings together three of Seattle’s leading technology visionaries, who have already set about building a world-class team comprised of top talent from cloud pioneers including Amazon Web Services.”
Founded by three former leaders from enterprise storage pioneer, Isilon Systems, and storage and data management leader, NetApp, Igneous’ leadership team brings deep business and engineering experience in the enterprise technology market.
Bhageshpur has more than 20 years’ experience in enterprise technology, the last six of which he spent in engineering leadership roles at Isilon. Most recently, he served as the vice president of engineering at EMC where he spearheaded all aspects of product development in the Isilon Storage Division.
Byron Rakitzis, Igneous’ Chief Architect, has over 30 patents in storage and file systems. As the first non-founding employee of NetApp, Rakitzis was integral to the development of NetApp’s Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) and more recently worked on their all-flash storage solution. Jeff Hughes, Igneous’ VP of Engineering, spent more than 8 years in product engineering at Isilon, serving as the Director of Engineering for EMC’s Isilon Storage Division since 2012, said the release.
“Cloud technologies have proven to be powerful change-agents across all segments of the enterprise IT landscape, providing infrastructure and services at unprecedented scale,” said Bhageshpur. “This Series A round enables Igneous to accelerate development of our product as we work to transform the data center with a cloud solution that solves some of today’s most complex engineering challenges.”