Storage software startup WekaIO Inc. revealed that it had raised $31.7 million in funding from the technology industry, including among others Qualcomm Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Western Digital Corp, Nvidia Corp.
WekaIO will be using the capital to widen the adoption of its Matrix file system, which is designed to speed up workloads such as machine learning models and analytics applications that process a lot of data. WekaIO develops scalable file storage for data-heavy applications. Founded in 2014 by Israeli entrepreneurs Liran Zvibel and Omri Palmon, the company employs 44 people in San Jose and Tel Aviv, according to Pitchbook data.
We have developed a Flash-native parallel file system with a low-latency storage protocol that natively leverages 100 Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand to make sure that customers get faster than local storage performance – Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO of WekaIO
This speed is the fruit of some unusual design choices. Matrix is built to run on Linux servers but also installs its own custom real-time operating system to speed up processing. Specially developed software components inside Matrix likewise handle low-level tasks such as transmitting input and output instructions to a machine’s flash drives.
