Violin Memory Flashes Forward With a $50 Million Mezzanine Round and $800+ Million Valuation

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Apr 2, 2012) - Violin Memory, Inc., provider of one of the world's fastest and most scalable flash Memory Arrays, today announced $50 million in Series D funding, putting the company at a market value of more than $800 million just three years after CEO Don Basile joined. Investors include long time partners Toshiba and Juniper Networks in addition to new investors SAP Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, among others. With this latest round, Violin continues to be one of the fastest growing storage companies in the past decade.

"At the intersection of big data, virtualization and business critical applications, Violin's flash based primary storage puts us in a unique position to capitalize on the hyper-growth of flash in the enterprise data center," said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. "This is a multi-billion dollar market opportunity and the latest funding enables us to accelerate our aggressive go-to-market strategy and enhance our data management software portfolio to bring the benefits of Violin's technology to customers worldwide."

These investments from several of the largest public companies in the computer industry (both announced and unannounced) further validate the inevitable shift from disk to flash for primary enterprise storage. Driven by trends like big data, analytics, mobile 4G, social commerce and virtualization, Fortune 500 companies are rapidly adopting Violin's flash technology to speed up mission-critical applications for improved performance and real-time business insights.

"IT leaders in the enterprise are embracing the in-memory database movement and the 'speed-of-thought' business benefits it brings," said Gaurav Tewari, Director, SAP Ventures, who will be joining Violin's Board as an Observer. "By supporting Violin Memory and its disruptive flash technology, we can help to accelerate this trend, remove today's memory limitations and open the field to all applications," added Nino Marakovic, Managing Director, SAP Ventures.

According to Scott Nelson, Vice President, Memory Business Unit at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc., "We are pleased to continue this relationship with Violin to address the needs of customers who are targeting the fast-growing cloud computing and data center markets. Toshiba's leading-edge NAND technology is an integral component in Violin's high-performance flash Memory Arrays."

Violin's flash Memory Arrays are changing the data center for companies like AOL, Revlon, Tagged.com, Juniper and HP through its patent-pending flash vRAID technology. Violin recently won AlwaysOn 2011 Company of the Year, SearchDataCenter Product of the Year, Gartner "Cool Vendor" for storage, and was named a Top Startup to Watch by SearchStorage.com.

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About SAP Ventures
SAP Ventures is an independent investment firm affiliated with SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the global market leader in enterprise application software, and we leverage our relationships with SAP and its global ecosystem for the benefit of portfolio companies. We make growth equity and later-stage investments in market-leading technology companies across North America, Europe, and key emerging markets. Over the last 15 years, SAP Ventures has supported more than 100 companies across five continents. Past investments include Commerce One, Endeca, Greenplum, MySQL, Red Hat, and WebEx. Current portfolio companies include Alfresco, Alteryx, Box, Exact Target, Marin Software, LinkedIn, Lithium, OnDeck, OpenX, SAVO, Spring Wireless, Tealeaf, Tremor Media, and Zend. For more information on SAP Ventures, please visit www.sapventures.com.

About Violin Memory, Inc.
Violin Memory is pioneering the future of Flash memory in the enterprise data center with Memory Arrays that accelerate business critical applications and enable enterprises to virtualize and optimize their IT infrastructures. Specifically designed for sustained performance with high reliability, Violin's Memory Arrays scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of IOPS with low, spike-free latency. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Violin Memory products, visit www.vmem.com.