Western Digital Capital

Western Digital Capital, established in 2015, serves as the corporate venture capital arm of Western Digital Corporation, based in San Jose, California. The firm focuses on partnering with innovative startups that enhance the generation, storage, management, and consumption of data. It invests in sectors such as data centers, enterprise solutions, Internet of Things, consumer devices and services, as well as components and subsystems. By providing capital, expertise, and valuable connections, Western Digital Capital aims to support the growth of emerging organizations that are shaping the future of data technology.

Amir Fridman

Managing Partner

29 past transactions

Ethernovia

Series A in 2023
Ethernovia is focused on creating an advanced Ethernet system capable of meeting the increasing bandwidth demands of modern vehicle integration. By unifying vehicle networks, Ethernovia's technology significantly influences automotive design and manufacturing processes. The system incorporates features such as autonomous expansions, enhanced security intelligence, and optimized sensor bandwidths, allowing clients to innovate and develop vehicles more effectively. Through its sophisticated approach, Ethernovia aims to redefine how cars are architected, ultimately contributing to the evolution of the automotive industry.

Niron Magnetics

Venture Round in 2022
Niron Magnetics, Inc. specializes in the development of advanced permanent iron nitride magnets, which are used in motors and generators. Founded in 2014 as a spinout from the University of Minnesota, the company is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Niron aims to address the growing demand for high-performance, lightweight magnetic materials, particularly in the context of increasing reliance on hybrid and electric vehicles and renewable energy sources like wind power. The company’s proprietary iron nitride magnets offer higher magnetization and lower production costs compared to traditional rare-earth magnets, enabling significant advancements in the efficiency and design of electric motors and generators. Niron has received backing from various governmental organizations, including ARPA-E and the National Science Foundation, to support its innovative manufacturing processes and material formulations.

Kinara

Series B in 2021
Kinara specializes in developing low-power programmable processors, specifically vision processing units designed for computer vision and image processing applications. The company's innovative technology is faster and more energy-efficient than traditional GPU and DSP processing methods, making it suitable for a range of markets, including mobile systems, data centers, and automotive. Kinara's offerings include a comprehensive stack of real-time deep learning software tailored for computer vision, enabling small devices such as drones, robots, and IoT cameras to incorporate embedded computer vision capabilities. Established in 2013 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Kinara aims to enhance the performance of modern computer vision solutions while reducing power consumption.

Wasabi

Series C in 2021
Wasabi Technologies, Inc. is a cloud storage provider that offers a fast and cost-effective platform for hybrid and multi-cloud media workflows. The company specializes in hot storage solutions compatible with Amazon S3, delivering average time-to-first-byte speeds of less than 15 milliseconds and ensuring data integrity with active checking. Wasabi's services support a variety of applications, including archiving, backup and recovery, content delivery, and data analytics, catering to sectors such as media and entertainment, education, healthcare, and law enforcement. The company provides a free trial capped at 1 TB of storage and offers flexible pricing options, ensuring that organizations can access secure and reliable data storage without complex pricing structures or unpredictable fees. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Wasabi was previously known as BlueArchive, Inc. before rebranding in 2017.

Iridia

Series B in 2021
Iridia, Inc. is a nanotechnology company based in Carlsbad, California, focused on developing innovative DNA-based data storage solutions. Founded in 2016, Iridia combines expertise in biochemistry, molecular biology, and semiconductor fabrication to create a groundbreaking read and write data storage hard drive that utilizes DNA for long-term data retention. By leveraging DNA polymer synthesis technology and electronic nano-switches, the company aims to achieve exceptionally high-density data storage through a highly-parallel format that includes an array of nanomodules. Formerly known as Dodo OmniData, Inc., Iridia rebranded in March 2018 to reflect its commitment to advancing data storage technology.

SiFive

Series E in 2020
SiFive, Inc. is a semiconductor company that specializes in designing and manufacturing chips, particularly focused on RISC-V architecture. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, with additional offices worldwide, SiFive develops multi-core application processors, embedded microcontrollers, and system-on-chip (SoC) products tailored for various applications, including IoT and wearables. The company provides software development kits, toolchains, and utilities to facilitate the development of RISC-V devices, enhancing the efficiency and affordability of hardware design. By leveraging open-source principles and software automation, SiFive aims to accelerate innovation in the semiconductor industry, enabling both large and small businesses to bring new hardware solutions to market more rapidly.

NGD Systems

Series C in 2020
NGD Systems, Inc. specializes in the development and manufacturing of advanced computational storage drives (CSDs) designed for enterprise and data center applications. Founded in 2013 and based in Irvine, California, with an additional office in Hsinchu, Taiwan, the company offers innovative solutions such as The Newport Platform, which provides next-generation computational storage capabilities, and the In-Situ Development Platform, enabling developers to create applications for in-situ processing. NGD Systems' products feature high-capacity NVMe CSDs that are power-efficient and compact, making them suitable for a variety of demanding environments, including edge computing networks, artificial intelligence, machine learning applications, and content delivery networks. By integrating computational capabilities directly into storage devices, the company aims to enhance data management and processing efficiency in data-intensive scenarios.

WEKA

Series C in 2019
WekaIO has built the world's fastest parallel file system, designed to solve the performance challenges in AI deep learning and technical computing. Matrix, WekaIO’s flagship product, leapfrogs legacy storage infrastructures by delivering the highest performance, lowest latency storage at a fraction of the cost or traditional NAS. WekaIO's software provides a seamless hybrid cloud solution between on-premises data centers and the public cloud. WekaIO has customers in several high performance markets including autonomous vehicle AI training, genomics, financial modeling, EDA, software development, satellite imaging and media and entertainment.

Komprise

Series C in 2019
Komprise, Inc. is a data management company based in Campbell, California, founded in 2014. It specializes in intelligent data-aware management software that simplifies how businesses store, organize, and analyze both on-premise and cloud data. The company addresses key challenges in data management, particularly focusing on unstructured data, by providing a platform that utilizes data growth analytics to manage data throughout its lifecycle. This includes capabilities for data analytics, replication, archiving, and migration, allowing organizations to effectively handle both hot and cold data across various storage systems. Komprise has established a strategic partnership with Ochser Consulting Group to enhance its service offerings.

Pliops

Series B in 2019
Pliops Ltd, founded in 2017 and based in Ramat Gan, Israel, specializes in developing innovative cloud storage solutions. The company was established by veterans of the flash storage industry and aims to create a new category of products that significantly enhance data access speeds for cloud and enterprise data centers. Pliops' technology enables data access up to 50 times faster while reducing computational load and power consumption to one-tenth of traditional methods. By streamlining multiple inefficient layers into a single, ultra-fast device, Pliops addresses scalability challenges posed by the rapid growth of cloud data and the increasing demands of artificial intelligence and machine learning applications.

Codasip

Series A in 2018
Codasip Ltd. is a technology company based in Brno, Czech Republic, specializing in application-specific instruction set processors (ASIPs) and electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Founded in 2006 as a spinout from the Brno University of Technology, Codasip has established itself as a pioneer in RISC-V processor IP, being the first vendor to offer tools for automatically tailored RISC-V processors. Its silicon-proven Studio™ tool suite allows Internet of Things (IoT) developers to create optimized RISC-V processors tailored to specific software applications. The company serves a diverse clientele, including notable firms such as AMD, Mobileye, and AVG, and has formed strategic partnerships with various technology organizations. Codasip's innovative solutions enhance processor automation and production efficiency, supporting the development of advanced devices for the IoT ecosystem.

Silk

Corporate Round in 2018
Silk's Cloud Data Platform enhances cloud efficiency by optimizing performance and reducing costs for organizations. It allows businesses to achieve up to ten times the performance from their existing cloud data while simultaneously decreasing expenditures by 30%. The platform integrates seamlessly between the application stack and cloud infrastructure, ensuring that operations run more effectively without requiring any changes to existing systems. Key features include real-time data reduction, thin provisioning, and continuous resource optimization, which collectively ensure that cloud spending aligns with actual data requirements at all times. This innovative approach enables organizations to maximize their cloud capabilities while minimizing unnecessary costs.

Excelero

Corporate Round in 2018
Excelero, Inc. specializes in low-latency distributed block storage solutions designed for web-scale and enterprise applications. Founded in 2014 and based in San Jose, California, the company developed NVMesh, a software-defined block storage solution that employs Elastic NVMe technology. This innovation enables unmodified applications to access pooled NVMe storage devices across a network with local speed and latency. Excelero's solutions cater to a diverse range of sectors, including data analytics, machine learning, media and entertainment for post-production, and high-performance computing. By leveraging NVMesh, customers can create high-performance Server SANs that efficiently handle mixed workloads while benefiting from centralized storage without being locked into proprietary hardware. This approach significantly reduces total storage costs while enhancing scalability and performance, making it suitable for hyper-scale Industrial IoT services and large-scale simulation visualization.

ScyllaDB

Series C in 2018
ScyllaDB is a developer of high-performance column-store database software, specifically designed for data-intensive applications requiring low latency and high throughput. The company offers a NoSQL database that is compatible with Apache Cassandra, delivering performance improvements that are significantly faster than traditional systems. By simplifying data modeling and reducing complexity, ScyllaDB enables users to complete NoSQL projects more efficiently and with fewer errors. Founded as Cloudius Systems, the company initially pioneered unikernel technology with OSv, which was optimized for running single applications on hypervisors. Based in Herzliya, Israel, ScyllaDB also provides customer support services to assist its clients in leveraging their powerful database solutions effectively.

SiFive

Series C in 2018
SiFive, Inc. is a semiconductor company that specializes in designing and manufacturing chips, particularly focused on RISC-V architecture. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, with additional offices worldwide, SiFive develops multi-core application processors, embedded microcontrollers, and system-on-chip (SoC) products tailored for various applications, including IoT and wearables. The company provides software development kits, toolchains, and utilities to facilitate the development of RISC-V devices, enhancing the efficiency and affordability of hardware design. By leveraging open-source principles and software automation, SiFive aims to accelerate innovation in the semiconductor industry, enabling both large and small businesses to bring new hardware solutions to market more rapidly.

esperanto.ai

Funding Round in 2017
Esperanto Technologies Inc. specializes in developing energy-efficient computing solutions utilizing the open standard RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, with additional offices in Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; and Barcelona, Spain, the company focuses on addressing the demands of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning applications. By leveraging the RISC-V ISA, Esperanto aims to provide high-performance solutions that meet the needs of computationally intensive workloads while promoting flexibility and scalability. The founding team, with extensive experience in processor design and architecture, is committed to driving innovation in computing by offering clean-sheet solutions that avoid the limitations of legacy systems.

Upmem

Seed Round in 2017
UPMEM is implementing the first scalable, programmable and efficient Processing-In-Memory (PIM) solution for the datacenter. In server architectures, Big Data processing performance is limited by data movements. UPMEM solution accelerates 10+ times data-intensive applications with an innovative solution based on a large number of programmable co-processors located next to the data.

Elastifile

Series C in 2017
Elastifile specializes in innovative data storage and management solutions that cater to the needs of enterprises operating in cloud and hybrid cloud environments. The company offers a distributed file system designed for scalability and high performance, which integrates object tiering to facilitate unified access to global data. By eliminating traditional storage silos, Elastifile empowers organizations to move applications seamlessly across various cloud platforms, enabling them to fully utilize cloud infrastructure for diverse data-driven workflows, such as analytics, DevOps, and high-performance computing. Its technology combines elements of cloud services, virtualization, and data communications to create a cohesive storage solution, helping clients adapt to and thrive in the evolving cloud landscape.

Tegile

Series E in 2017
Tegile Systems, Inc. specializes in providing flash-driven storage solutions, including hybrid and all-flash storage arrays, designed for various enterprise applications such as databases, server virtualization, and virtual desktop environments. The company's patented IntelliFlash architecture optimizes performance by utilizing different types of storage media, enabling high input/output operations and low latency. Tegile's offerings include a flexible storage operating system that allows users to adjust the flash component to enhance both performance and cost efficiency. The company serves a diverse range of sectors, including government, education, and various enterprise markets. Founded in 2010 and based in Newark, California, Tegile operates as a subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation.

Avere Systems

Series E in 2017
Avere Systems, Inc. specializes in cloud file storage infrastructure, focusing on hybrid cloud NAS architecture. The company provides a range of products, including Virtual FXT Edge filers, which serve as network-attached storage in the compute cloud, and CloudFusion, a cloud-based file system that streamlines file management by eliminating the use of isolated storage silos. Avere's offerings also include various software solutions for storage management, data migration, data protection, and cloud integration. These solutions enable enterprises to optimize storage performance while reducing complexity and costs associated with data storage. Avere serves multiple industries, including government, financial services, media and entertainment, life sciences, oil and gas, and software development. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Avere Systems operates as a subsidiary of Microsoft Azure, leveraging advanced storage technology to enhance data accessibility and security for its clients.

ScyllaDB

Series B in 2017
ScyllaDB is a developer of high-performance column-store database software, specifically designed for data-intensive applications requiring low latency and high throughput. The company offers a NoSQL database that is compatible with Apache Cassandra, delivering performance improvements that are significantly faster than traditional systems. By simplifying data modeling and reducing complexity, ScyllaDB enables users to complete NoSQL projects more efficiently and with fewer errors. Founded as Cloudius Systems, the company initially pioneered unikernel technology with OSv, which was optimized for running single applications on hypervisors. Based in Herzliya, Israel, ScyllaDB also provides customer support services to assist its clients in leveraging their powerful database solutions effectively.

Panzura

Series E in 2017
Panzura, Inc. specializes in enterprise storage infrastructure designed for the cloud era. The company offers a Global Cloud Storage System that includes the Panzura Controller—an on-premise appliance that interfaces with the Global File System—and Panzura Software, which orchestrates the system's operations. This architecture integrates cloud storage with network-attached storage functionalities, allowing for seamless scalability across multiple locations. Key features include automatic file locking, immediate global data consistency, and high-performance local file operations. Panzura's solutions enable companies to utilize cloud storage as a globally accessible data center while ensuring security through data de-duplication, encryption, and centralized management. Their services cater to a diverse range of sectors, including oil and gas, healthcare, and entertainment, providing solutions for file sharing, project collaboration, and data protection. Founded in 2008 and based in Campbell, California, Panzura was previously known as Pixel 8 Networks LLC.

Upthere

Venture Round in 2016
Upthere, Inc. is a cloud computing company based in Palo Alto, California, incorporated in 2011. It specializes in providing a consumer cloud-storage platform designed to serve as a central repository for personal data, including photos, videos, music, and documents. The platform allows users to save, view, search, organize, and share their content, ensuring that important and meaningful information is stored safely and privately. As of August 2017, Upthere operates as a subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation, enhancing its capabilities in cloud services.

Kazan Networks

Series A in 2016
Kazan Networks Corporation specializes in developing high-performance networking and enterprise storage solutions. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Auburn, California, the company focuses on products such as iSCSI controllers, FC-to-SATA bridges, and SAS controllers. A key offering is the KN-EVAL_1.0 customer evaluation kit, designed to allow customers and partners to test the emerging NVMe over Fabrics standard. This kit provides a fully-functioning implementation based on an FPGA, facilitating optimal performance and flexibility while enabling straightforward plug-and-play connectivity between hosts and SSDs over Ethernet links. Kazan Networks operates as a subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation.

EverSpin Technologies

Series B in 2015
EverSpin Technologies, Inc. specializes in the development and manufacturing of magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) products. Founded in 2008 and based in Chandler, Arizona, the company offers a variety of MRAM solutions, including Toggle MRAM, spin-transfer torque MRAM, and tunnel magneto resistance sensors. These products cater to various applications in sectors such as data centers, industrial, automotive, transportation, and enterprise storage. EverSpin serves original equipment manufacturers and original design manufacturers through a combination of direct sales and a network of representatives and distributors. The company's international reach extends to markets in the United States, Hong Kong, Japan, China, and Germany.

Amplidata

Series E in 2014
Amplidata N.V. offers AmpliStor, an object-based software defined storage solution for enterprise, private cloud, and public cloud implementations in various industries in Belgium and internationally. The company offers Himalaya Service Provider and OEM Edition software, a customizable platform for service provider and OEM-built storage services and solutions; and Himalaya Enterprise Edition software, which provides users with control over their data. It also offers a range of appliances that include the AmpliStor software with servers, as well as controllers and storage nodes connected through a standard switched Ethernet fabric. In addition, the company provides support and professional services for large enterprises, service provides, and distributed government organizations. It offers solutions for cloud services, life sciences, media and entertainment, oil and gas, online applications, digital library, video surveillance, government, and Fortune 500 enterprises. Amplidata N.V. has a strategic partnership with Western Digital Capital. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in Lochristi, Belgium with an additional headquarters in Milpitas, California. It also has support centers in the United States, Belgium, and Taiwan. Amplidata N.V. operates as a subsidiary of HGST Netherlands B.V.

Avere Systems

Series D in 2014
Avere Systems, Inc. specializes in cloud file storage infrastructure, focusing on hybrid cloud NAS architecture. The company provides a range of products, including Virtual FXT Edge filers, which serve as network-attached storage in the compute cloud, and CloudFusion, a cloud-based file system that streamlines file management by eliminating the use of isolated storage silos. Avere's offerings also include various software solutions for storage management, data migration, data protection, and cloud integration. These solutions enable enterprises to optimize storage performance while reducing complexity and costs associated with data storage. Avere serves multiple industries, including government, financial services, media and entertainment, life sciences, oil and gas, and software development. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Avere Systems operates as a subsidiary of Microsoft Azure, leveraging advanced storage technology to enhance data accessibility and security for its clients.

Hightail

Series E in 2013
Hightail is a cloud service that lets users send, receive, digitally sign, and synchronize files. Hightail addresses the problems of creative collaboration and visual project management between teams of creative professionals and their clients and other stakeholders. An innovator in the cloud since before the term was even coined, Hightail (FKA YouSendIt) began as a simple way to send files that were too large for email and have since grown to evolve the cloud into a virtual workspace that enables seamless collaboration on visual projects from concept to completion.

Skyera

Series B in 2013
Skyera specializes in providing affordable flash memory solutions for enterprise solid-state storage systems. The company's Skyhawk series is engineered to deliver high performance and low power consumption, making it suitable for a wide range of applications such as cloud computing, big data, mobility, and social networking. By focusing on cost-effective solutions, Skyera aims to enhance the efficiency of enterprise storage systems while meeting the demands of modern data-driven environments.
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