HPE, Cisco Object Storage Tech Partner Scality Unveils Huge New $60M Funding Round

Distributed file and object storage technology developer Scality Tuesday said it closed a new round of funding that brought the company $60 million.

With the new round, total funding in Scality, which partners with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems in on-premises and cloud object storage environments, has now reached $152 million, said Jerome Lecat, CEO of the San Francisco-based company.

"We figure we are by far the biggest startup in the industry," Lecat told CRN.

[Related: Cloudian Buys Infinity Storage, Plans To Combine Object And File Data Into Single Storage Pool]

The new funding round will be invested primarily in developing the company's technology, with some of the funding also going to enhancing sales and marketing capabilities, Lecat said.

Scality is currently focused more on growth than on profits. The company is still two years from being cash-flow-positive, Lecat said. "We won't need another funding round, but we may do one for the purpose of acquiring other companies," he said.

The company's current main business vertical is health care, where the average deal is about $450,000 just for the software. In addition, five of the top 15 banks and a similar ratio of telcos use its software, he said.

Scality lives in a very competitive environment, Lecat said.

Competitors include Dell EMC, IBM and its Cleversafe acquisition, NetApp, and dozens of smaller companies, Lecat said.

The new round of funding is exciting news for Scality and its partners, said Erik Krucker, chief technology officer at Comport Technology Solutions, a Ramsey, N.J.-based solution provider and Scality channel partner.

"This says to me, and to a lot of customers, that there are people who believe in Scality's offering," Krucker told CRN. "This funding will continue to ensure customers that Scality knows what it is doing, that it is investing in R&D and competing even better in the marketplace."

Scality is unique in how its technology solves complex storage problems related to unstructured archived data, Krucker said.

"It lets us provide highly scalable distributed data management with connects to Amazon S3 and other cloud environments," he said. "Other companies can do this. But Scality was early to market, and provides highly scalable deep repositories with a variety of storage services including S3, CIFS and NFS."