Escape Velocity – The initial speed required to go from an initial point in a gravitational potential field to infinity
– Wikipedia
Last week when Pavilion was honored Best in Show at Flash Memory Summit in the most innovative Flash Memory Startup category, the award was met with mixed emotions. Of course, we were proud and humbled. According to show organizers, a record number of award submissions were received this year, making the judging quite challenging and each of the categories extremely competitive. At the same time, it was overshadowed knowing that today we would be announcing the news of an oversubscribed Series C funding round.
Like a rocket ship firing its third stage booster, the Series C investment allows us to break free of the gravitational force that causes so many to crash. Pavilion has reached escape velocity. We are no longer a startup.
With a multitude of marquee customers across the globe, many 7-figure transactions, and repeat purchases, our Hyperparallel Flash Array and OpenChoice Storage™ business model are disrupting the industry. Already this year we have been named an IDC NVMe over TCP Innovator, a CRN Hottest Storage Startups to Watch, is the first NVMe-oF Solution for Spectrum Scale on IBM’s Global Solutions Directory, became a Dell Extended Technologies Partner for direct and channel resale, and have been awarded 4 patents (bringing the total to 14).
Customer feedback has been extraordinary. Cisco Systems reported 16M 4K IOPS at less than 1-microsecond latency in a half-populated array. Another large account described their implementation as “making the impossible possible.”
As we reflect on our accomplishments, thank our founders, investors, and employees who launched this rocket ship, we now enter the next phase of growth.
Our focus? First, continued aggressive innovation leveraging industry-standard hardware and sophisticated software in a system built for NVMe and NVMe-oF from the ground up. Second, share our expertise and the customer experience in workloads spanning IBM Spectrum Scale, MySQL, and NoSQL databases, as well as Pivotal(™) Greenplum while unifying modern cloud and legacy enterprise applications, including the Pivotal™ Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes with persistent K8s, and VMware. Third, expand our global footprint. Series C lead investor Taiwania Capital is committed to our expansion in the Asia Pacific. We will build upon our success in North America and EMEA by expanding our sales presence in these markets and plan to showcase technology advancements and customer experiences at VMworld Europe in November.
According to NASA achieving escape velocity is one of the biggest challenges facing space travel.
A vehicle requires an enormous amount of fuel to break through the gravitational pull. All that fuel adds significant weight to the spacecraft, and when the object is heavier, it takes more thrust to lift it. To create more thrust, you need more fuel.
It’s a vicious cycle to be a startup, and even when you reach escape velocity, the navigation is far from complete. Stay tuned as the journey continues.