Nutanix builds data infrastructure for companies globally.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: Nutanix, a San Jose, California-headquartered company which builds data infrastructures for companies around the world, recently raised $140 million in another funding round, which valued the company at $2 billion.
The latest investment, backed by Fidelity Investments and Wellington Management, came a few months after an investment of $101 million from Riverwood, Khosla Ventures, and others in January, reported Reuters. In the past they raised over $170 million from venture firms, including Battery Ventures, Blumberg Capital, SAP Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Nutanix, founded in 2009 by IIT Kanpur alum Dheeraj Pandey, builds server and storage systems and competes with older companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and EMC Corp. Its customers include Toyota, and the US Army. The company offers data processing and analytics tools similar to that of Google and Facebook, which manage huge amounts of consumer information, to companies that might not be as tech-oriented: the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Navy, ConocoPhillips and Honda. It also has tech companies eBay and Yahoo Japan as its customers.
Other start-ups worth more than $1 billion include payments company Stripe, online home-furnishings company Wayfair and enterprise-data management company Cloudera.
“Our goal was to really build a relationship with institutional buyers,” said Pandey, the Nutanix chief executive officer, to Reuters. “What results out of that is a much bigger IPO,” not just because of the relationships, but because the funding round gives it more time to grow as a private company.
Pandey said he was eyeing an IPO sometime next year, or possibly 2016, depending on market conditions.
The San Jose Mercury News reported that Nutanix is growing 200 percent year-over-year. It has about 800 customers, more than 650 employees and offices around the world, from Australia to the Netherlands.
ARN reported that the latest round of funding would be used to invest in sales, research and development, customer support and marketing and enable the company to accelerate its vision of making web-scale infrastructure ubiquitous in enterprise datacentres.
“We are proud of the progress we have made, and are confident in capitalising on the enormous opportunity that lies ahead of us,” Pandey was quoted as saying.
In June, Nutanix announced a landmark OEM agreement with Dell to build the XC Web-scale Converged Appliance.
The Dell-branded XC Series combines Nutanix software with Dell hardware and is scheduled for general availability in the fourth calendar quarter of 2014.
In July and August, Nutanix signed distribution agreements with Arrow and Avnet.
Prior to founding Nutanix, Pandey was the VP of Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases.
Pandey is a Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of Computer Science. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Kanpur), where he was adjudged the “Best All-Rounder Student Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines.”