Simplyblock, the Berlin-based high performance cloud storage startup, has just announced a $2.75m seed funding round.
The round was led by 42CAP, alongside Antler, Begin Capital, and Johan Svensson, the founder of Neo4j, the graph database company, among others.
Simplyblock builds low-latency, high performance cloud storage. In an industry dominated by cloud providers in the US and Israeli startups, Simplyblock claims it is the only startup from Europe building in this space.
The company is initially targeting database users of any kind (SQL, NoSQL, Vector or Graph) as first customers. With the first release, Simplyblock will be available for AWS users worldwide.
IT Europa met Simplyblock in Berlin on the IT Press Tour last June, as it came out of stealth mode and set out on building a channel strategy.
The company outlined how it would expand from the DACH region and into the wider European area and elsewhere - once its storage orchestration solution reached general availability, which it is still working towards.
The technology currently focuses on improving data storage performance at the block level, but is expected to move up the stack and expand into file services, and address growing issues such as ransomware protection.
Rob Pankow (pictured right), co-founder and CEO, said at the time: “We are looking at a channel go-to-market, first through cloud service providers, and then edge SaaS providers and managed service providers and cloud marketplaces down the line.”
The company maintains the software gives users the performance of a SAN system, while providing the cost-effectiveness and flexibility of a software-defined solution. The product is priced “pay-per-use” on an “effective storage capacity per month”, ie, per terabyte.
The funding round will allow Simplyblock to expand its engineering team and make sure the product reaches general availability later this year – the original aim was to do this last year.
