Diablo Technologies secures $37 million in Phase II of oversubscribed Series C round

Ottawa’s Diablo Technologies, whose Memory Channel Storage technology platform enhances memory system design performance and capability, has secured a total of $37 million to close out Phase Two of its oversubscribed Series C round, adding new investors Genesis Capital and GII Tech Ventures, and new follow-on investments from Battery Ventures, BDC Capital, Celtic House Venture Partners, Hasso Plattner Ventures and Israeli Cleantech Ventures (ICV).
Phase One of the Series C round happened in January, raising a total of $19 million, led by ICV.
Diablo’s Memory Channel Storage platform combines software and hardware architectures with NAND-Flash, and future Non-Volatile Memory technologies, effectively introducing a new generation of Solid State Storage for data-intensive applications.
“Diablo is privileged to be working with investors who are as committed as we are to leveraging the benefits of NAND-flash to enable dramatic improvements in big data analytics and in-memory computing,” said Diablo Technologies CEO Mark Stibitz. “This investment gives us even more capability to expand sales and customer application support, and strategically accelerate our DMX software roadmap.”
Diablo is just now announcing production release and volume availability of its Memory1 128GB DDR4 system memory module and accompanying Diablo Memory Expansion (DMX) software.
Memory1 was awarded Best of Show for “Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology” at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, for the third consecutive year.
Founded in 2003, Diablo opened its Ottawa office in 2004. In 2013, it introduced its memory channel storage approach to data access, and opened a Silicon Valley office in 2015.
Diablo’s leadership team, which includes CEO Mark Stibitz and Chief Product Officer Riccardo Badalone, have previous experience working on system architecture, chipset design, enterprise software and business development at companies including PMC-Sierra, Anobit, Elliptic Technologies, AT&T-Microelectronics, Agere Systems, Bell Labs, Nortel Networks, Intel, Cisco, AMD, SEGA, Cadence Design Systems, Matrox Graphics, BroadTel Communications and ENQ Semiconductor.
Ottawa-based Celtic House was the first company to invest in Diablo back in 2005, while ICV was put in touch with Diablo through a contact with Massachusetts-based Battery Ventures.
Hasso Plattner Ventures of course bears the name of Hasso Plattner, German co-founder of enterprise software giant SAP, and author of “The In-Memory Revolution”.
GII Tech Ventures partner Vijay Parmar, whose focus is on mid-stage technology investments in companies with a product already in production and an existing customer pipeline, has joined Diablo’s board of directors.
“We are thrilled to have Diablo Technologies in the GII Tech portfolio. The combination of Diablo’s innovative product portfolio and well-timed position in the Cloud and Enterprise datacenter market is extremely compelling,” said Parmar. “I’m looking forward to working with the Diablo team to help realize the company’s next wave of growth.”
Diablo’s Memory1 and Memory Channel Storage products deliver flash as “system memory” without necessitating changes to server hardware, operating systems, or user applications by the IT department, resulting in greater memory capacity on fewer servers and lowering datacenter costs by up to 70%.
As data processing needs for enterprise increase, with Big Data analytics, caching and complex web applications stretching the workload limit for existing IT hardware, solutions like Memory1, which provides 1TB or 2TB of system memory in a single two-socket server, allow companies to run terabytes of low-power system memory on a single server, keeping capital expenditures down.
Memory1 uses JEDEC-compliant flash-based DIMM hardware, which fits into standard DDR4 memory slots, increasing memory performance without any need to change the CPU, motherboard, operating system, or applications.