Nexenta Systems, the world leader in OpenStorage solutions, today announced it has secured more than $21 million in Series C financing, with Menlo Ventures as its new lead investor. Sierra Ventures and Razor's Edge Ventures also participated in this round. They join current investors Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink Capital.

The infusion of funding follows three years of growth exceeding 400% year-over-year, which makes Nexenta the fastest growing company in enterprise storage. In the past year, Nexenta reached a number of significant corporate milestones, including driving $300 million in hardware sales through the channel, serving more than 4,000 customers and tripling its workforce while staying very capital efficient and funding most operations from sales proceeds. This round of funding will be used to sustain the company's growth, pace of innovation and global expansion to meet the rapid demand for the company's solutions.

"We had choices when we decided to raise a growth round, and are delighted to be working with Pravin Vazirani from Menlo Ventures. Menlo has had a strong track record of successful investments in the storage space including investments in 3Par, Spinnaker Networks, Pliant and Carbonite and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. We are also excited that Tim Guleri from Sierra Ventures will be working with us, as his experience will add value to the board as well."

"Legacy storage companies, with their reliance on customer lock-in and out of date technical foundations, are not able to address today's exponential growth in storage demand," said Nexenta CEO Evan Powell. "Most new storage start-ups simply perpetuate the same old 'lock 'em in' business model, with a snazzier name plate on the array and unproven software under the hood. This investment will enable us to make enterprise class storage for everyone a reality for tens of thousands more partners and end users around the world. We had choices when we decided to raise a growth round and I couldn't be happier to be partnering with Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures as we seek to open up one of the last bastions of antediluvian lock-in based business models in enterprise IT."

Nexenta Products

Nexenta's high-performance unified storage software runs on any industry standard hardware, addressing a critical need for enterprises and cloud service providers struggling to balance growing data volume with legacy business model lock-in and aging technologies. The company's open business model and proven track record with large, enterprise-class customers, like the U.S. Army, NOAA, and Korea Telecom, along with partners such as VMware, Citrix, Cisco, Intel, Dell, and Arista, make its flagship NexentaStor product the ideal storage solution for cloud deployments, virtualized data centers, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

About Nexenta Systems

Nexenta Systems is the leading supplier of enterprise-class OpenStorage solutions. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on any industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or call (877) 862-7770. Partners selling NexentaStor based hardware/software appliances can be found at www.nexenta.com/partners.

About Menlo Ventures

Menlo Ventures provides smart capital for seed through growth technology companies in the consumer and enterprise sectors. For decades, the firm's market-driven research analysis has led to the identification of and successful exits in innovative technology markets. Notable research-areas of investment include Mobile (Siri, MobiTV, TeleNav), Enterprise storage (3Par), Communications (Acme Packet, Cavium Networks), and Consumer (Carbonite, Roku). Founded in 1976, Menlo's portfolio includes 70 public companies and more than 100 mergers and acquisitions. Throughout our history, Menlo's deep network of portfolio entrepreneurs, angels and advisors are a key resource made available to all of our family of investments. Menlo Ventures has $4 billion under management and is currently investing Menlo Ventures XI, a $400m fund with $20m allocated to our Menlo Talent Fund for fast seed funding. For more information, visit http://www.menlovc.com.