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The rebranded and refocused Kaminario all-flash array business has raised $55 million to accelerate its sales and marketing efforts and expand engineering development.

Silk is the July 2020 public rebrand of all-flash array vendor Kaminario, which has ported its array software to the cloud AWS, Azure and GCP and provided sparkling performance there (and here too.)

CEO Dani Golan said in an announcement: The cloud vendors are now beginning the fight over customers databases and other mission-critical crown jewels. To win this fight, they need to guarantee that customers will meet their own end users SLAs, by enabling prime scalability and performance of their mission-critical applications. Having this capital allows us to bring the vision [of] accelerated cloud adoption to a wider audience.

S Capital led the investment round, which it calls a B-Round (more on that below), with participation from existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Pitango, Globespan, Ibex, and Vintage, and new investors including Clal Insurance, Bank Hapoalim, Meitav Dash and Menora Mivtachim.

Silk said the round is a testimonial to its exponential growth, against a background of demand for cloud environments rising rapidly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Silk says it is a database supercharger its software sits between the public cloud infrastructure and the customers database, and makes cloud environments run 10x faster and the entire application stack more resilient to any infrastructure hiccups or malfunctions. It claims the speed increase makes the cloud database faster than the same database running on-premises.

Silks Azure cloud speed is based on using ephemeral OS disks as explained here.

The company is a Microsoft Azure IP co-sell incentivised partner,an AWS ISV technology partner, and a GCP partner.

Kaminario became Silk in July 2020, and the overall Kaminario/Silk entitys funding history, as we have recorded it, looks like this:

We have no record of any funding for Silk since it came into being in July 2020, before todays round. Logically then, this B-round could be a Silk-only B-round. But that could only be true if, first, there has been a Silk-only A-round (of which there is no record) and second, you ignore previous Kaminario funding rounds. If you dont then this Silk B-round is actually the overall Kaminario-Silk entitys G-round.

We have asked Silk to clarify the funding round nomenclature. A Silk spokesperson told us: Silk was founded in 2019, andthe first round, which happened at founding, was $35 million. This new second (oversubscribed) round is for $55 million.

That $35 million round in 2019 was news to us and is, logically, a Silk-only A-round. Total Kaminario-Silk funding now stands at $313 million, while Silk-only funding totals $90 million.

The journey from being an all-flash array vendor, to a software-defined flash array vendor, to a public cloud database storage accelerator, has been long and hard. To be experiencing exponential growth now, after two strategy pivots, must be seriously satisfying not least because of the potential for future growth.

We note that Silk, marketing itself as a cloud database accelerator, has neatly differentiated itself from other all-flash array vendors with a cloud software presence.

See the article here:
Silk gets $55M to supercharge databases in the cloud Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files