Last week US-based GridGain Systems announced that it raised $15 million in a Series B funding round led by Sberbank, Russia’s national savings bank, and MoneyTime Ventures. The latter, a Moscow-based fund, manages Sberbank’s international venture arm SBT Venture Capital.
Almaz Capital, an international fund with Russian roots, and RTP Ventures, the New York City-based venture arm of the Russian venture fund Ru-Net, also participated in the round. The two funds had already injected $10 million in GridGain in 2013, as reported by Vedomosti.
The funding round will be used “to expand sales, marketing, and R&D, and to fuel GridGain’s continued international growth,” the company stated.
Launched in 2010, GridGain has developed a “revolutionary” enterprise software platform for real-time data access and processing. Christened ‘In-Memory Data Fabric,’ the solution is based on the Apache Ignite open source project.
According to the company, “the software delivers unprecedented speed and unlimited scale to accelerate business and time to insights. The In-Memory Data Fabric enables high-performance transactions that run up to 1,000X faster than disk-based approaches. It also provides real-time streaming and fast analytics in a single, comprehensive data access and processing layer. The solution powers existing and new applications in a distributed, massively parallel architecture on affordable, industry-standard hardware, which can be easily scaled by adding more nodes to the compute grid.”
In 2015, GridGain was selected by AlwaysOn as an “AlwaysOn Global 250 Winner,” and was named a “Trend-Setting Product in Data and Information Management for 2016” by Database Trends and Applications.
A $10 billion market in three years
The company claims a strong leadership position in the in-memory computing market, which Gartner expects to grow to $10 billion by 2019.
“This funding round reflects GridGain’s tremendous sales growth and solid execution during the past three years,” said Abe Kleinfeld, President and CEO of GridGain. “It also acknowledges the rapid market shift from traditional disk and flash-based storage to high-speed, high-scale in-memory computing architectures, and the emergence of the converged data platform. GridGain has averaged triple-digit annual sales growth during the past three years, recently expanded into Europe, and made successful inroads in financial services, tech, and other verticals. This funding will enable us to accelerate our momentum and extend our market leadership.”
“Data has evolved into the new asset of a modern enterprise, and the ability to mine this data rapidly and intelligently is a sum of the platform and individual competencies,” said Andrey Khlyzov, Senior Vice President at Sberbank and a major GridGain customer. “GridGain has enabled us to acquire unique expertise and co-develop a market-winning platform.”
