Elastifile, a company developing new storage technology that dramatically improves the performance and reduces the cost of large data centers and private clouds, announced it has raised $8 million in Series A financing from Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. As part of the investment, Battery General Partner Itzik Parnafes and Lightspeed Partner David Gussarsky will join Elastifile's board.

Elastifile's co-founders are serial entrepreneurs and highly experienced executives. They include CEO Amir Aharoni, previously an executive at Mobixell Networks and Optibase; CTO Shahar Frank, co-founder of XtremIO, a leading flash array storage company which was acquired by EMC in May 2012; and VP of Research and Development Roni Luxenburg, formerly director of software engineering at Red Hat.

Elastifile is redefining storage for the next generation of software-defined data centers and private clouds, which require elastic, high-performance, cost-effective and converged compute and storage services. The company's solution leverages emerging and pervasive data-center technologies such as flash-based storage media and 10GE networks.

'Elastifile's unique, built-from-the-ground-up, flash-dedicated architecture will deliver an elastic scale-out solution, which the new breed of fast-growing data centers and private clouds need -- at an unmatched price-performance ratio,' said CEO Aharoni. 'And we could not ask for better partners in this venture than Battery and Lightspeed, two firms with extensive experience and track records of success in the fast-growing, enterprise-storage market.' Both firms previously invested together in XtremIO.

'Elastifile is solving a big problem,' added Battery's Parnafes. 'The flexibility, manageability and performance of Elastifile's solution will change the way storage architects manage primary storage in their data centers.'

'I am excited to back such a seasoned team with a singular focus and ambitious vision,' said Gussarsky, of Lightspeed. 'The potential market for this technology is enormous, and we look forward to partnering with Amir, Shahar and Roni to build innovative new products.'

About Elastifile

Elastifile develops a new elastic, scale-out, and converged storage solution for next-generation data centers. The company, based in Herzliya, Israel is building a unique, high-performance scale-out solution for virtualized data-centers and private clouds. Elastifile was founded by industry veterans Amir Aharoni, Shahar Frank and Roni Luxenburg, all serial entrepreneurs, and is backed by Battery Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

About Battery Ventures

Battery invests in cutting-edge, category-defining businesses in markets including software and services, Web infrastructure, e-commerce, digital media and industrial technologies. Founded in 1983, the firm backs companies at stages ranging from seed to buyout and invests globally from offices in Boston, Silicon Valley and Israel. To learn more, visit www.battery.com and follow the firm on Twitter @BatteryVentures.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $2 billion under management and teams in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed more than 200 consumer, enterprise and cleantech companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Nimble Storage, Brocade, DoubleClick, eHealth, Flixster, Fusion-io, Informatica, Kosmix, Nicira, Provigent, Riverbed Technology, Virsa Systems and XtremIO. http://lsvp.com/.