OpenIO, an innovator in object storage and serverless computing, today announced a $5 million founding round led by Elaia Partners, Partech Ventures, and Nord France Amorcage.

OpenIO offers an innovative architecture for building object storage infrastructures that are easy to deploy and scale over time. Its event-driven computing framework allows businesses to optimize data access and simplify complex workloads by offloading some tasks directly to the storage infrastructure.

OpenIO will use the new funding to expand its team, consolidate the EMEA market, and develop new markets in the USA and Japan.

OpenIO was founded by a small team of experts, engineers, and former intrapreneurs at Worldline, a 1.5 billion euros Atos company. Led by Laurent Denel and Jean-François Smigielski, (now respectively CEO and CTO at OpenIO), the team set out to solve the problems of massive storage infrastructures more than ten years ago. They developed innovative ideas to deal with real-world problems, and OpenIO's software is the culmination of their research and design. They have successfully completed projects with petabytes scale production platforms and managing hundreds of billions of objects.

In recent years, OpenIO has built on those successes, adding innovative features to SDS, its open-source object store. At the same time, it has developed a new serverless computing framework which is gaining traction among customers and opening new markets, including big data, IoT, and machine learning applications.

According to IDG, by 2022, 93% of all data in the digital universe will be unstructured. With this unprecedented data growth, the scalability, flexibility and lightweight design of a solution like OpenIO will make a difference in building sustainable large-scale storage and compute infrastructures.

"Huge amounts of data are produced and consumed every day, and the IT industry is experiencing a major revolution," said Laurent Denel, CEO and co-founder of OpenIO, "Big data, IoT and machine learning applications are driving this transformation. At OpenIO, as we have solved the storage problem of massive amounts of data, and while much of the industry focuses on lower $/GB, we help businesses to create more value from their data."

"The exponential growth of edge computing and new data-driven applications is forcing the industry to rethink infrastructure in general and software defined storage solutions in particular," said Reza Malekzadeh, General Partner at Partech Ventures, "OpenIO has the vision, the technology and the right team to address these new needs".

"The world most valuable resource is now data. We were very impressed by OpenIO's team and product: their breakthrough, field-proven technology in Software Defined Storage is today's most scalable, easy to use, and cost effective data storage solution for the data-driven enterprises", added Marc Rougier, Partner at Elaia Partners.

We were attracted by the quality of OpenIO's solution, but also by the creativity of the entire team," said Johan Cnossen, Principal at Siparex. "We can see that OpenIO is thinking about the future of data storage, and that the company is at the leading edge in this area."

OpenIO is just at the beginning of a data storage revolution. Building on its existing technologies, the company will go further and enhance the way data is stored, processed, and more importantly used.

About OpenIO
OpenIO brings the future of object storage to businesses of all sizes today. It offers the most flexible and versatile solution to solve the scale-out challenges businesses face, from 1TB to thousands of Petabytes. This open-source solution provides a new way to build backend services for applications, allowing companies to combine storage with integrated data processing on a single platform.

OpenIO, next generation object storage and serverless computing. Find out more at http://www.openio.io, and follow @openio on Twitter.

About Partech Ventures
Founded in 1982 in Silicon Valley, Partech Ventures is a global investment firm with a team spread across offices in Paris, Berlin and San Francisco. Most Partners have been entrepreneurs themselves or have held management positions within tech companies. The partnership acts and invests as a single team, helping entrepreneurs build fast-growing tech and digital companies addressing large markets across multiple continents. Partech Ventures partners with entrepreneurs at the seed (Partech Entrepreneur), venture (Partech International) and/or growth (Partech Growth) stages. Companies backed by Partech Ventures have completed 21 initial public offerings and more than 50 major M&A transactions with leading international companies. Since 2012, the team has built a pioneering business development platform fostering synergies and business relationships between entrepreneurs and strategic partners. For more information visit www.partechventures.com and follow @partechventures.

About Elaia Partners www.elaia.com
Created in 2002, Elaia Partners is an independent Venture Capital firm focused on the digital economy. Elaia Partners has more than €250m under management and invests in high potential, disruptive start-ups from the first financing rounds to the emergence of global leaders. With more than 60 years of cumulated experience in both venture capital and digital industries, the investment team offers a hand in hand, proactive and relevant support to its entrepreneurs.

Elaia Partners was an early investor in companies such as Sigfox, Mirakl, Criteo, Teads, Talent.io, Agriconomie, Shift Technology, tinyclues, Orchestra Networks, Agnitio, Stanley Robotics, etc.
Twitter: @Elaia_Partners

About Nord France Amorcage
Nord France Amorcage is a co-investment fund of 30 million euros which is entirely financed by the Hauts-de-France region. It is operating in pari passu operations on the side of other private investors in order to finance local and innovating companies in their seeds and series A rounds. The fund is advised by Siparex, France's leading independent private equity specialist, which has 1.8 billion euros in assets under management.