Western Digital has announced plans to invest tens of millions in enterprise solid state storage company Skyera. The investment is part of Skyera's Series B round of funding and Western Digital says Western Digital Capital co-invested in the $51 million round as part of the 'strategic relationship' between the two companies. WD says this relationship will include the joint development of new technology but did not say what this new tech might be.
"One of our primary goals in developing strategic relationships with technology innovators in the broader storage ecosystem is to enable customers to develop highly optimized storage solutions that meet their changing data management needs," said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer, Western Digital.
"We see companies like Skyera as offering a dramatic improvement over traditional approaches to emerging storage challenges. We will continue to support innovation by collaborating with customers and partners, and investing in companies who are addressing today’s most exciting storage opportunities."
Western Digital is one of the largest HDD manufacturers in the world but the company no doubt wants to make sure it has a nice solid entry into the SSD market, too. For Skyera, the money mean the company can pour more funding into engineering as well as more mundane but equally necessary parts of the business (like marketing).
"The backing of Western Digital has enabled us to ramp our business across marketing, sales and engineering which has been instrumental in creating the industry’s most innovative solid-state solution," said Radoslav Danilak, chief executive officer of Skyera. "With our skyHawk family of enterprise solid-state storage systems we are witnessing the next era of solid-state storage and I strongly believe that having a close working relationship with Western Digital, the world’s top disk drive vendor, is invaluable as we set out to reshape the storage landscape."
This isn't Western Digital's first investment in Skyera, either. According to WD, it previously funded Skyera as its initial outside investor.
