After three years of stealth development, Hedvig emerged today with the announcement of $12.5 million in venture funding and a mature software-defined storage platform that fundamentally changes the economics of enterprise data storage and management. With the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform, cloud and data center professionals can consolidate storage of any type or location into a virtualized pool that drops the provisioning time and costs to small fractions of what it would take with traditional storage technologies today. Hedvig's venture funding is a combination of seed and Series A rounds led by True Ventures and Atlantic Bridge, respectively. True Ventures and Redpoint Ventures also participated in the Series A.

'We considered launching the company at the seed round stage more than a year and a half ago, but many industry experts did not believe what we were doing could be done so it didn't make sense to publicize our company until our platform was proven and in production at several customer sites,' said Hedvig Founder and CEO Avinash Lakshman. 'You only get one chance with storage. Enterprise data is arguably one of the most important business assets and we needed to earn our customers' trust with a rock solid product. Today we are proud to unveil our storage platform that looks like the infrastructure that Google, Amazon and Facebook run internally, but packaged to bring that capability to any enterprise data center.'

Leveraging his success in building distributed computing systems at Facebook and Amazon -- and along the way creating next-generation platforms including Cassandra and Dynamo (the genesis of NoSQL) -- Lakshman saw an opportunity to apply a distributed systems approach to storage. His vision was to bring flexibility and simplicity to the compounding problem of data growing at 30 percent or more each year, a problem that every company faces.*

'Storage platforms that were built just five years ago cannot handle modern workloads which are complex, heterogeneous and spread across internal data centers and the cloud,' said Brian Long, General Partner at Atlantic Bridge. 'To keep up with this rapid pace of growth and change, storage platforms must now be software defined. They must also be scalable, streamlined and most importantly, flexible enough to make instant provisioning changes.'

Based on the company's patented distributed systems capabilities, the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform enables complete protocol consolidation by collapsing several layers of the storage stack into a single software platform, empowering enterprises with the ability to choose how to provision their storage. Organizations can increase capabilities as their needs evolve, without the need to reset their storage architecture. The Hedvig platform powers the ability to scale from several terabytes to petabytes and seamlessly spans on-premise, private and public clouds. Customers benefit from an elastic, hybrid cluster that can grow incrementally to thousands of nodes by simply adding additional commodity servers. Policy and provisioning processes that normally take hours, days or weeks now take just a few clicks and can even be performed from mobile devices. [Editor's note: See announcement titled, 'New Hedvig Platform Disrupts the Data Storage Industry With Flexibility and Choice,' issued today for more information on Hedvig's technology.]

'I've worked closely with Avinash and the Hedvig team from the start. I think we can all agree that software-defined storage is the future, but Hedvig tackles the problem from a very unique, distributed systems approach,' said Puneet Agarwal, Partner at True Ventures. 'We look forward to seeing the company grow and pave the future of modern storage.'

The software-defined storage market is poised to reach $13B by 2020. Today, 78 percent of enterprises are looking at or are already using a software-defined storage solution.** However, the first generation of software-defined architectures cannot keep pace with scale-out applications or the velocity of change in the current business climate. As enterprises continue to store and analyze more data, and embrace new apps that generate their own data, storage professionals are unable to predict their requirements and meanwhile, 58 percent struggle with the days, weeks or even months of time it takes to provision storage.**

For more information and a demonstration of how Hedvig is redefining software-defined storage, please visit http://www.hedviginc.com.

About Hedvig
Hedvig is rearchitecting software-defined storage. Hedvig accelerates data to value by collapsing disparate storage systems into a single platform, creating a virtualized pool that provisions storage with a few clicks, scales to petabytes and runs seamlessly in both private and public clouds. Built by software engineers of the world's largest and most successful distributed systems, Hedvig delivers modern storage for any enterprise compute environment running at any scale. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is unconstrained by traditional thinking and existing architectures, resulting in the only software-defined storage incorporating true distributed systems capabilities. Built to keep pace with scale-out applications and the velocity of change in today's business climate, the Hedvig platform gets better and smarter as the system scales, transforming commodity hardware into the most advanced storage solution available today. Customers such as Intuit, Dovilo, Van Dijk and Paul Hastings LLP use the Hedvig platform to transform their storage from a box where data resides to a fundamental business enabler. www.hedviginc.com