Berlin-based Simplyblock, a cloud storage startup, announced on Thursday that it has secured $2.75M (approximately €2.5M) in a seed round of funding led by 42CAP alongside Antler and Begin Capital.
High-profile angel investors include Johan Svensson, the founder of Neo4j, the leading graph database company, who also participated in the funding round.
The latest capital injection will allow the German company to expand its engineering team and take the product to general availability later in the year.
Simplyblock is already open for early-access customers running databases on AWS.
Simplyblock: Developing low-latency high-performance storage software
Founded by Rob Pankow, and Michael Schmidt, Simplyblock develops low-latency, high-performance storage software that helps businesses maximise the efficiency of their cloud storage for critical workloads, databases & applications.
The company does it by leveraging technology advancements in SSD drives (NVMe technology).
Michael Schmidt, co-founder & CTO of Simplyblock, comments, “As a CIO, I started to question the cost/performance ratio of Enterprise Storage Systems in the light of the latest generation of storage hardware such as ultra-fast NVMe SSDs. It turned out that Enterprise Data Storage is quite an inert industry. And later on, it became evident that fast cloud storage has at least the same potential for innovation and optimization. That is how we came up with an alternative, which is more flexible and better scalable, has better performance at much lower cost, and reduced carbon emissions than today’s systems and services.”
The company’s tech, mostly written in C/C++, leverages low-level Linux features to enable millions of IOPS with sub-millisecond latency. This results in software 10x faster and has a 50x better cost-to-performance ratio than legacy enterprise solutions and existing cloud storage.
Currently, the company is 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.
The software can be deployed on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, as well as private clouds.
At present, the company employs a small but very experienced team of ten, which includes engineers who have worked for companies such as NVIDIA, Mellanox, NetApp, Dell EMC, Instana, and Timescale.
The investor
42CAP is a pan-European VC firm investing in seed-stage technology-driven companies across Europe with global ambition. The VC firm supports data- and technology-driven business models, product-focused founders, and sustainable venture development.
Moritz Zimmermann, General Partner at 42CAP, says, “We were surprised how much room for optimisation there still is in data storage – something that at first glance might seem like a commodity and highly optimised thing. The deep-tech nature of such technology makes it relatively sticky, and innovation must be radical for the users to make the switch. The technology change in storage usually happens in 10-20 year cycles. Simplyblock is tackling the problem from an innovative angle, breaking many of the existing paradigms in terms of how storage is accessed and consumed, and we believe that they can be a leader of the next technology wave in cloud storage.”
Begin Capital is a venture capital firm focusing on global pre-seed – Series A investments.
Begin has a sector agnostic approach but specialised in infrastructure SaaS, vertical SaaS, and deeptech. The firm has invested in companies like FundraiseUp, Convious, Middleware and Bulbshare.
Joël van Dijk, Partner at Begin Capital, comments, “The Simplyblock team is one of the strongest tech teams out there in the European cloud storage sector. There is momentum and a necessity created for optimizing data storage. Data usage and storage will be growing exponentially, and therefore, there will be an expected price increase from the supply side.”
Antler is a seed investment firm that supports founders from the pre-idea stage with coaching and the opportunity to meet co-founders during a residency programme. It can invest up to Series C. The VC firm provides founders with a platform to build their co-founding teams, get better access to venture capital funding, and scale their businesses faster.
Alan Poensgen, Partner at Antler, comments, “Rob and Michael excited us as a founding team. They make a very compelling combination – one deeply technical founder with decades of experience who built this technology to solve real problems that he faced and one operating founder with a proven track record scaling some of Europe’s most successful tech companies. They are uniquely placed to build this type of cloud storage solution – a first in Europe – and we are delighted to have supported them from day zero.”
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/berlins-simplyblock-raises-2-5m/
