Kazan Networks Corporation announced today it has closed a $4.5M Series A funding round led by Samsung Ventures, with participation from Intel Capital and Western Digital Corporation.

'Raising money these days is not trivial, yet we ended up with an over-subscribed round, which I think speaks to the strength of both the team and our product direction,' said Joe Steinmetz, CEO of Kazan Networks. 'This round sets us up nicely to continue to grow the team and execute our roadmap through 2016 and beyond.'

As the solid-state drives (SSDs) used in datacenter storage have leapt forward in speed and capacity, cloud service providers need faster interfaces for moving data between the storage media and the network. Kazan Networks has developed a sub-1us latency solution of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) over Fabrics*, which connects high performance storage to racks of servers in the datacenter. The company's Ethernet-based technology not only delivers lower latency than competing solutions, but it is the only solution to implement both varieties of RDMA acceleration over Ethernet. Simultaneous RoCE and iWARP support means customers need not worry about choosing one protocol over the other.

'Kazan Networks is developing products that are enabling the overall NVMe over Fabrics ecosystem, and we are happy to participate in their Series A round,' said Jay Chong, Vice President at Samsung Ventures.

'NVMe over Fabrics is a key enabler to support attaching thousands of NVMe SSDs in modern rack-scale designs,' said Amber Huffman, Intel Fellow in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group at Intel Corporation and chair of NVME Express Workgroup (nvmexpress.org). 'Kazan has been a leader in the standards definition, and their products enable the ecosystem to connect storage to the fabrics in an integrated manner.'

'We are pleased to have participated in Kazan's Series A financing round and look forward to helping the company further develop its NVMe over Fabrics solution,' said Mark Long, President, Western Digital Capital. 'Western Digital strongly supports products and technologies designed to improve the performance of existing storage network applications, particularly those which will help data center customers unlock the full performance advantages of flash storage.'

For more information about purchasing a Kazan Network product or joining the team, please visit their website at http://kazan-networks.com.

*Demonstrated at Intel Developer Forum in 2015

About Kazan Networks

Kazan Networks is a privately held startup founded in Dec 2014 by storage networking veterans. The company is located in Auburn, CA, and is currently sharing details about their products to select customers.

About Intel Capital

Intel Capital, Intel's strategic investment and M&A organization, backs innovative startups targeting computing and smart devices, cloud, datacenter, security, the Internet of Things, wearable and robotic technologies and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$11.7 billion in 1,457 companies in 57 countries; in that timeframe, 605 portfolio companies have gone public or been acquired. Through its business development programs, Intel Capital curates thousands of introductions each year between its portfolio executives and Intel's customers and partners in the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world's most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.