Igneous Systems, which delivers the industry's first hybrid cloud backup and archive solution for unstructured data, announced today that Vulcan Capital and Orca Bay Capital joined existing investors in its Series-B financing round of $15 million. Igneous customers include leading Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises, and the company plans to utilize the funds to enable continued market penetration of its Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud offering.

"Our research revealed enterprises struggling with rapid data growth and the complexity of managing their digital assets," said YB Choi, Partner, Vulcan Capital. "With Igneous, we saw a proven team with deep domain expertise taking an innovative approach not only from a technology perspective to help organizations protect and manage data at petabyte scales and beyond but also in their as-a-Service delivery model in a segment of enterprise IT that has eluded public cloud adoption."

IDC reports that rapid growth in unstructured data will continue in both public cloud as well as enterprise datacenters and colocation facilities. From 2016-2021, unstructured data will grow at 33.9% CAGR in public cloud and 20.0% in enterprise datacenters and colocation facilities.

"We are living in a hybrid world, and we will continue to do so," said Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO of Igneous Systems. "While horizontal applications are moving to Software as-a-Service and smaller custom workloads are moving to public cloud Infrastructure as-a-Service, there are many enterprise workloads involving key digital assets that will remain hybrid. We aim to help those enterprises protect, manage, discover, and learn from their unstructured data living in a hybrid world."

Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud modernizes data protection and management for unstructured file data that currently resides on network attached storage systems like those from NetApp, Dell EMC Isilon, or Pure Storage. The solution is designed for enterprises with petabytes of unstructured data spanning billions of files and hundreds of file systems, and it provides its own on-premises, scale-out secondary storage as well as tiering and replication to public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

For enterprise data typically strewn across multiple silos, Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud consolidates management of all unstructured data and integrates search and retrieval across all tiers of data, spanning primary storage, secondary storage, and cloud. In addition, through its unique, cloud-native software architecture, Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud provides a modern approach to enabling data-centric workloads involving analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Igneous customers span a number of industries challenged with unstructured data growth, including life sciences, electronic design automation, gaming, and finance. With this announcement, Vulcan Capital and Orca Bay Capital join existing investors Madrona Venture Group, New Enterprise Associates, and RedPoint Ventures as institutional investors in Igneous to help the company fuel its continued expansion to a broader number of enterprises.

To help guide and advise this expansion, Stephen Mullaney has joined the Igneous board of directors. Prior to his role on the Igneous board, Mullaney was the CEO of Nicira, Inc. until its acquisition by VMware in 2012 where he served as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the networking and security business unit until September 2014. Prior to Nicira, he served as Vice President of Marketing and interim CEO at Palo Alto Networks. He also served as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Blue Coat Systems, Force10 Networks, ShoreTel, and Growth Networks. Mullaney holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rhode Island.

"The enterprise challenge we see today is that network performance has not grown as fast as unstructured data," said Mullaney, "The promise of public cloud and as-a-Service delivery has changed the IT industry faster than anything we've seen to date, but the world will remain hybrid for quite some time. I believe Igneous is in the right place at the right time, with its combination of a true hybrid cloud technology architecture, business focus on unstructured data, and an as-a-Service delivery model."

Igneous was named a 2017 Gartner Cool Vendor in Storage Technologies, a Red Herring Top 100 North America winner, and a CRN 2017 Emerging Vendor. In addition, Igneous was named a CRN 2017 Tech Innovators finalist.

About Vulcan Capital
Vulcan Capital is the multi-billion dollar investment arm of Vulcan Inc., the company founded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen. Vulcan Capital is focused on generating long-term value appreciation across a portfolio which spans diverse industry sectors and investment asset classes, ranging from early-stage venture investments to public equity value investing, leveraged buyouts, acquisitions, and distressed situations.

About Igneous Systems
Igneous Systems delivers the first backup and archive solution for massive unstructured data. Designed for a hybrid world, Igneous' solution serves digital enterprises whose data is growing both on-premises and in cloud. Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud streamlines data management, providing data protection, movement, learning, and search and discovery for enterprises with billions of files and petabytes of data on network-attached storage. Delivered as-a-Service, Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud brings the agility of cloud to customer datacenters. Igneous' customers include leading Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises. Gartner recognized Igneous as a "Cool Vendor in Storage Technologies" in 2017.