Qumulo Secures Round C Prime Funding – My Conversation with Bill Richter

Today, Qumulo, vendor of the software-defined scale-out storage platform Qumulo Core, announced the completion a funding round of $30 Million. This C Prime round of funding brings the total amount invested in Qumulo to date to $130 Million.

This new funding round was led by Northern Light Venture Capital and other first-time investors in Qumulo. Previous Qumulo investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), Madrona Venture Group, Top Tier Capital Partners, and Tyche Partners also participated in this round.

This new round of investment in Qumulo follows some recent management changes that include the appointments of

As long-time readers will know, I’ve been a fan of Qumulo since the beginning. At my previous employer, I was the PreSales Engineer in a deal where we sold a Qumulo cluster even before the company had emerged from stealth mode. At Qumulo’s invitation, I attended the company’s launch party.

So, you can imagine my excitement when Bill Richter and Jay Wampold took some time out of their busy day yesterday to spend some time speaking with me about today’s announcement and anything else I felt like asking them.

The Funding Round

I specifically asked how many new investors had backed Qumulo in this round of funding. Seeing as Qumulo is privately held and some of their investors have chosen to not yet reveal themselves publically, Bill and Jay declined to answer this one.

Bill did, however, say that there has been a “significant increase in inbound interest” in Qumulo. In fact, their funding round was oversubscribed (meaning that they’d set out to raise $30 Million and found investors whose willingness to invest in Qumulo totaled more than $30 Million). When pressed, Bill said that two-thirds of this round’s investment was “new money”, i.e., from organizations who had not previously invested in Qumulo.

Similarities to and Differences from Isilon

I asked Bill what commonalities he saw between Qumulo’s corporate culture and Isilon’s. He said, “We’re innovative disruptors. We’ve taken the status quo — that most customers are dissatisfied with — and said that it doesn’t need to be that way. It’s about focusing on the customer’s experience.”

When I asked if he saw any significant differences between the culture at Isilon when he was there and the current culture at Qumulo, Bill said the following:

“The biggest thing is that the world has changed so much. Isilon was working to be an appliance, but Qumulo is 100% software-defined. It’s a completely different approach.”

“Qumulo was founded by the core group that wrote Isilon’s OneFS. Like any other project, if you knew then what you know now, you would get to avoid the mistakes you made, plus you know the current marketplace.”

As an example of the marketplace changes, Bill talked about public cloud. Isilon wasn’t designed with the idea of connecting to public cloud in mind from the start — why would it have been? There wasn’t anything like today’s public cloud options available back then. Qumulo, however, has been able to take the idea of moving data to the Cloud into account from the start.

Unanswered Questions

While, yes, I’m a Qumulo fan, that didn’t mean I was going to go easy on them. Here are the questions I asked that went unanswered:

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