The News: Hammerspace has raised $56.7 million in its first outside funding round to accelerate bringing its parallel global file system to market. You can read more about it at the Hammerspace website.
Hammerspace Raises $56.7M in Funding to Unlock Business Opportunities
Analyst Take: Although Hammerspace was founded in 2008, this is its first institutional funding round, led by Prosperity7 Ventures with contributions from Pier 88 Ventures, ARK Invest, and others. Until now, Hammerspace founder and CEO David Flynn relied on himself and other private investors to fund the company.
Hammerspace uses metadata-driven data orchestration to manage files across different devices and locations. Its policy-driven orchestration uses AI to manage where data resides, based on performance and cost requirements. Hammerspace competes with other cloud-based global file system vendors such as Nasuni, CTERA and Panzura, but also with parallel file systems such as IBM Storage Scale with Active File Manager (the GPFS software with advances from IBM Research), Lustre, and Weka.
During Hammerspace’s quarterly update webcast, Flynn and Prosperity7 Ventures managing director Jonathan Tower highlighted two trends that they think will propel the company. One is the large unstructured data sets required for large language models (LLMs) and other types of AI. The second is the dispersed workforce that has become a way of life for many since the Covid pandemic. Hammerspace’s target customers have been companies with multiple data centers, remote workforces, and high volumes of unstructured data.
Hammerspace is now chasing enterprises looking for HPC-type performance characteristics. Instead of embedding file systems in storage devices, global file systems can span storage devices and even data centers by extracting data from storage systems.
The funding is a significant boost for Hammerspace, coming at a time when investments in IT companies are declining. Flynn said the investors backing Hammerspace are not looking for a short-term return, but are willing to stick with his company as it grows – possibly past an IPO.
Hammerspace plans to use the funding to expand its technology and customer service teams. The money comes as Hammerspace begins to make inroads into a competitive market. It claims Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company and a large (unidentified) hyperscaler as recent customer wins. Other customers include the National Science Foundation and Royal Caribbean. Even before the funding, Hammerspace invested $120 million on R&D, and built relationships with cloud partners Microsoft Azure and Seagate Lyve.
With years of R&D and now funding in place, the Futurum Group expects to see Hammerspace become a more significant player in the enterprise file system market.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Dave focuses on the rapidly evolving integrated infrastructure and cloud storage markets.
