Komprise Preps For Expansion With New $24M Funding Round

Intelligent data management technology developer Komprise on Tuesday will officially unveil the closing of a new Series C round of funding that brought the company $24 million, with San Jose, Calif.-based Western Digital coming in as a strategic investor.

With the new round, which also included Top Tier Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Walden International, total investment in the Campbell, Calif.-based company has reached $42 million.

Komprise develops software that manages unstructured data across NAS and cloud environments, including environments based on platforms from such partners as NetApp, Dell EMC Isilon, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM, and more, said Krishna Subramanian, Komprise president and COO.

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"We augment the capabilities of our partners' technologies with analytics on the data, and with the ability to push the right data to the right place," Subramanian told CRN. "A lot of data gets cold fast. Our software finds cold data and moves it to low-cost archives, but the data still looks like its active data on the user's storage platform."

Subramanian admitted the new $24-million round of funding may not seem a lot compared to the $261 million round that Rubrik received or the $500 million round that Veeam received in January.

However, she said, Komprise is a software-focused company which saw its growth in 2018 double each quarter on a quarter-to-quarter basis and saw the capacity of data managed by its technology grow by 600 percent in 2018 over 2017.

All sales go through channel partners, Subramanian said.

Komprise is not yet cash flow-positive, but is still in investment mode, Subramanian said. The company in 2018 made three major enhancements to its products, including the ability to manage data in the cloud, make the management functions cloud-native, and allowing NAS migration, she said.

Komprise is an exciting company in how it manages data for an increasingly growing secondary storage market, said Jeff Klenner, president of Evotek, a San Diego-based solution provider and Komprise channel partner.

The Komprise software-defined technology lets clients look at different classes of data and make sure the data gets sent to the right place, Klenner told CRN.

Other companies can do it as well, but Komprise has an elegant way of managing the data because of its software-defined nature, he said.

"The future will require more software-defined solutions for protecting data," he said. "So we'll see fewer adjacent solutions with different apps using different criteria to do it, and more centralized solutions. When we get to software-defined everything, and start separating the logic from the hardware, it will be powerful. So when you swap the hardware, there's no need to change everything."

The fact that Komprise closed a new round of funding indicates investor confidence, Klenner said.

"Ten years ago, people talked about a company getting new funding as if that company was a risk," he said. "Today, new funding is an asset. The company has such interesting technology that it is attracting new investments."