Incipient, Inc, a leading provider of intelligent switch storage software, announced today that it has raised $24 million in Series D financing bringing the total equity capital raised to $79 million. Leading this round is new investor QuestMark Partners, along with participation from Wasatch Advisors. Incipient’s major existing investors Globespan Capital Partners, GrandBanks Capital, Greylock, HLM Venture Partners, and Sigma Partners also participated in this round of financing. The Series D capital is earmarked for expansion of marketing and sales efforts in support of the Incipient Network Storage Platform (NSP) software suite.
“Our conversations with IT managers at large and mid-sized companies make it clear that storage virtualization is a technology that will receive close scrutiny this year,” said Richard Villars, vice president of Storage Systems research at IDC. “Solutions like Incipient’s that use storage virtualization to enable easy migration and replication of data across tiers of heterogeneous storage will play a key role in helping companies deal with growing data and information management challenges.”
“This financing is yet another powerful endorsement from the investment community of Incipient’s visionary approach to creating intelligent storage networks,” said Ric Calvillo, Incipient co-founder and chief executive officer. “As the market embraces storage virtualization, we anticipate Incipient NSP will become the de facto standard platform for delivering a common set of services across heterogeneous storage environments.”
“Emerging technologies continue to be a strategic area of focus for QuestMark Partners and we see the promise of the storage sector of the high-tech market,” said Michael Leidesdorff, principal, QuestMark Partners. “The predicted increase in IT storage spending and the storage virtualization market poses great opportunities for Incipient as intelligent storage plays an integral role in the evolution of SAN environments. Incipient is at the forefront with its intelligent storage platform and related partnerships and is well-positioned to assume market leadership.”
Incipient NSP is embedded in intelligent Fibre Channel (FC) switches and serves as a common software platform that delivers Incipient-developed, network-based storage applications throughout a SAN environment. This set of highly scalable integrated storage applications provide storage services such as volume management, data protection, copy services, automated provisioning and data mobility. Incipient NSP inserts an abstraction layer between storage and hosts, creating a storage virtualization layer where Incipient NSP-based storage services are implemented. Incipient NSP currently supports or will support intelligent FC switches manufactured by industry leading companies such as Cisco, Brocade, McDATA, QLogic and others.
