Alluxio, developer of the world's first software system that unifies data at memory speed, today announced that it has closed $8.5 million in Series B funding led by Seven Seas Partners with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the total funding raised to date to $16 million.

Jack Xu, Managing Partner of Seven Seas, joins the company's board of directors. The former president and CTO of China Internet giant SINA, Xu brings more than two decades of Internet and enterprise computing experience to Alluxio, including stints as corporate vice president at Cisco and vice president of engineering and research at eBay.

"Alluxio has developed core technologies for the next era of real-time computing, making it possible to run workloads anywhere - on premises or across public clouds at petabyte scales of data," Xu said. "This breakthrough, allowing the separation of computing and storage and bringing economies of scale for massive datasets, creates new business opportunities that we believe will transform a wide range of industries."

In addition, Veritas founder and former CEO Mark Leslie joined the investment round and will serve as a board observer.

"Alluxio has enjoyed tremendous early customer traction and shows the critical qualities of what I call an 'opportunity-driven' organization," said Mark Leslie, founder and ex-CEO of enterprise software storage pioneer Veritas (developers of the first commercially-available journaling filesystem), and lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business who has served on a range of public and private boards, including Pure Storage, NetApp, Nutanix, and others. "The key to enduring growth is strategic transformation and I am excited to help the leadership team at Alluxio to accelerate growth and embrace the challenges and rewards of building a true opportunity-driven business."

Alluxio is pioneering a new era of unifying data for powering modern data-driven applications and workloads like real-time analytics and machine learning that have been consistently growing in scale, with its technology in production at some of the world's largest financial services companies, e-commerce destinations and more, including Alibaba, Baidu, Barclays, Comcast, Development Bank of Singapore, ESRI, JD.com, Lenovo, Oracle, Paypal, Tencent and Wells Fargo.

"Alluxio is seeing incredible momentum, developing into a mature platform used in production by thousands of organizations, and that's allowing us to attract world-class leadership and investment," said Haoyuan Li, CEO and founder. "Companies from all sectors are looking to evolve their data architecture to enable real-time data analytics at massive scale. With this new funding, we'll be able to accelerate the development of Alluxio and expand the platform to enable all new classes of workloads."

About Alluxio
Proven at global web scale in production for modern data services, Alluxio is the world's first system that unifies data at memory speed. Named a Top 10 Storage Startup by CRN in 2018, Alluxio provides a single source virtual data layer connecting data analytics and machine learning frameworks to data running on premises, in public clouds or in multi / hybrid cloud environments. Intelligent data tiering and data management deliver consistent high performance to customers in financial services, high tech, retail and telecommunications. Venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Seven Seas Partners, Alluxio was founded at UC Berkeley's AMPLab by the creators of the Tachyon open source project.