Isilon Systems Secures $20 Million in Financing to Further Extend Leadership in Clustered Storage Market
SEATTLE, WA - MAY 25, 2005
Isilon Systems, the premier provider of intelligent clustered storage, has received $20 million in a fourth round of venture capital financing intended to help the company extend its leadership in the clustered storage space and gain an increasing share of the overall storage market. This round of financing was led by Focus Ventures, a leading expansion-stage venture capital firm that invests in emerging technology market leaders. Participating with Focus Ventures in the round of funding are all of Isilon's existing investors, including Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture and Madrona Venture Group.
The round, which was oversubscribed, will be used to fuel Isilon's continued rapid expansion of its global sales, channels, marketing and business development initiatives. [See separate press release issued today.] Isilon, which has already established itself as the leader in clustered storage, has raised total financing of $59.9 million since its inception in January 2001 and continues to pioneer the burgeoning market of clustered storage.
"What attracts us to Isilon is the company's demonstrated ability to develop innovative products that address a critical market need," said George Bischof, general partner for Focus Ventures. "With its impressive base of world-class customers, Isilon has taken ownership of the clustered storage category and its products are gaining strong momentum in the broader storage market."
Isilon's investors attribute the company's success to solid leadership, a strong understanding of market needs and business demands, and its consistent ability to deliver innovative products. In just 18 months, the company has shipped nearly two petabytes of clustered storage to its rapidly growing customer base, which spans large data-intensive markets such as media and entertainment, digital imaging, life sciences, oil and gas and the Federal Government.
"We are experiencing incredible growth across every key metric of our business and our products have set the bar for innovation in the industry," said Steve Goldman, president and chief executive officer for Isilon Systems. "We are winning new customers at a phenomenal rate and are seeing continued re-orders from our existing customers. This round of funding will enable us to accelerate our innovation, expand distribution and further extend our market leadership."
Isilon recently announced the next generation of its award-winning Isilon IQ clustered storage family - the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000 and 4800 storage systems and the newest version of its award-winning OneFS distributed file system software - which sets new industry standards for performance, scalability, ease of use and reliability. Isilon IQ is the first clustered storage system to scale to more than 150 Terabytes of capacity, deliver three gigabytes/second from a single file system, and support high-performance Infiniband for low-latency, high-bandwidth intracluster communication.
Isilon has been recognized with numerous product and company awards - including most recently being named to the Red Herring 100 Private Companies in North America and receiving a Storage Networking World Award for innovation for customer LexisNexis File & Serve's use of Isilon IQ clustered storage technology.
ABOUT ISILON SYSTEMS
Isilon is the premier provider of intelligent clustered storage systems. Isilon's award-winning family of Isilon IQ products consists of high-performance clustered storage systems that combine an intelligent distributed file system with modular industry-standard hardware to deliver unmatched simplicity and scalability. Isilon IQ was designed for digital content and large data-intensive markets, such as media and entertainment, digital imaging, life sciences, oil and gas and the Federal Government. The Seattle-based company is financed by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture, Madrona Venture Group and Focus Ventures. For more information, please visit: www.isilon.com.About Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to founders of startups who want to turn business ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs", Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of nVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.
Contact:
Greg McAdoo
SEQUOIA CAPITAL
mcadoo@sequoiacap.com
