Nimble Storage Closes $40.7 Million in Over-Subscribed Mezzanine Funding Round

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 10, 2012) - Nimble Storage, the leading provider of flash-optimized, hybrid storage solutions, today announced that it has received $40.7 million in an over-subscribed mezzanine funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. All other existing Nimble investors participated in the round, and Nimble welcomed GGV Capital as an investor. Nimble Storage will use the funding across its operations, with major emphasis on propelling growth in sales, engineering and international market development. To date, Nimble Storage has raised $98 million.

In a market characterized by increasing acceptance of flash memory for higher performance, and an ever-increasing number of new storage startups, Nimble stands out for its rapid pace of customer acquisition and widespread deployments. In two years since first shipping in August, 2010, Nimble Storage has sold over 1,000 deployments. Customers include leaders across a range of industries, among them Grocery Outlet, City of Cupertino, First Choice Health, Plaxo, Berkeley Research Group, San Mateo Credit Union, Premier Medical, Northrim Bank, San Diego Convention Center, Vision Critical, Imagine Learning and Graniterock. In the most recent quarter alone, Nimble Storage acquired more than 175 new customers.

The funding will enable Nimble to accelerate customer adoption through increased investments across its operations. The new round also positions Nimble to more rapidly broaden its European presence and to expedite plans to establish a presence and partnerships in the Asia Pacific region.

"Nimble Storage has delivered groundbreaking innovations and fundamentally reinvented the modern storage system," said Jim Goetz, general partner, Sequoia Capital. "The company has emerged to become a dominant force in data storage, and its market traction far outpaces other storage entrants of the past few years."

"Right out of the gate, Nimble Storage established itself as a company that could redefine the data storage landscape -- and it has," said Ping Li, partner, Accel Partners. "Nimble has clearly pulled away from the storage giants and flash-based start-ups alike, and proven its value across an amazing 1,000-plus deployments in the enterprise. Our investment in Nimble continues to deliver high long-term value."

"We're gratified by the immense acceptance we've received from customers across a wide range of markets, and by the continued trust of our backers," said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. "While most flash-based startups have concentrated narrowly on high-performance niches, we've leveraged flash into a much broader technology platform that delivers superior system performance, capacity efficiency, data protection, scalability, simplicity and overall ROI for mainstream enterprise applications. With our financial performance well ahead of our most aggressive estimates, we're continuing to reinvest across all areas of our operations as we advance towards an IPO and become an industry leader in the market evolution to flash-optimized storage."

Nimble Storage, founded by former Data Domain and NetApp executives Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari, has developed the industry's most efficient hybrid storage solutions. The company's CS-Series arrays enable fast inline data compression, intelligent data optimization leveraging flash memory and high-capacity disk, instant optimized backups, and WAN-efficient replication. This approach dramatically lowers equipment costs, reduces backup and restore time from hours to seconds, and streamlines storage management. In August, Nimble expanded its product portfolio with the introduction of the extreme-performance CS-400 Series of arrays and a new scale-to-fit architecture that provides customers an extremely cost-effective storage migration path as their organizations grow.

About Nimble Storage
Nimble Storage solutions are built on the idea that enterprises should not have to compromise between performance, capacity, ease of management, and price. Nimble's patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture, designed from the ground up to effectively combine flash with high capacity drives, makes high performance affordable, simplifies and enhances disaster recovery and backup, and delivers stress-free operations. Nimble Storage solutions are available through a global network of world class channel partners. For more information visit www.nimblestorage.com.

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