Pivot3, Inc., the leading provider of unified storage and compute appliances, today announced the closing of a $23 million round of new equity financing, which will principally be used to fund expansion of its product development, sales and marketing activities. Pivot3 has been widely recognized for innovation in converged scale-out IT infrastructure since its founding in 2003, and has deployed solutions for more than 500 customers worldwide.

Richard Bravman, Pivot3 CEO, commented, "I am very pleased that we have reached this important milestone. Coming at a time when our business has developed significant momentum through marketplace wins, it will allow us to invest in the further build-out of our innovation and go-to-market growth engines. Combined with recent moves to strengthen our team, it puts us in a great position to better serve our existing customers, penetrate new markets, deepen our partnerships and expand operations in both our rapidly growing core video surveillance and emerging IT businesses. We will accelerate the global roll-out of our innovative VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure initiative and introduce new solid state solutions and partner programs to the video surveillance market."

The round was led by Samsung Ventures, and participated in by all existing Pivot3 investors: Focus Ventures, InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial, Northleaf Capital Partners and Silver Creek Ventures.

In a related development, Pivot3 has set the foundation for executing a commercial partnership with Samsung Techwin, a global technology manufacturer and systems integrator. Brian Kang, managing director of Samsung Ventures America added, "We chose to invest in Pivot3 because we see them as a leading player in a large and rapidly growing space of strategic importance to our business. The commercial partnership with our Techwin affiliate yields an important second dimension of mutual opportunity for the companies." Techwin is a global provider of Security Solutions, a sector that leverages Pivot3's market-leading position and focus in converged compute / storage solutions for video surveillance.

Pivot3's Chairman, Ron Nash, partner at InterWest, concluded, "Pivot3 is in a great position to leverage this investment into robust future growth and business success. It has strong leadership, a focused strategy, terrific customer and partner relationships -- and accelerating momentum. This funding gives it the resources to capitalize on those assets and to build something truly great. The Company's management team and Board are committed to do just that."

About Pivot3

Pivot3 was founded in 2003 on the idea that today's stack of virtual servers, shared storage and networks could be radically simplified and unified through software innovation in order to drive down complexity and cost while dramatically increasing scale-out performance. Today, Pivot3 has over 500 customers across the globe deploying Pivot3 vSTAC™ unified storage and compute appliances. Pivot3 products are deployed in the data protection, virtual desktop infrastructure, digital video surveillance and rich media markets and have seen particular success in the public sector, transportation, education and retail vertical segments. The company has won numerous awards and was most recently selected by the Wall Street Journal for the prestigious "2011 Next Big Thing" category.