Japan Post backs $94m round for US-based Cloudian

Other participants included Eight Roads Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Digital Alpha, NTT Docomo Ventures, WS Investments, DG Incubation, WM Partners, and Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). The Series E round brings Cloudian's total capital raised to date to $173 million.

INCJ said in a release that it would contribute up to $6.5 million with a view to supporting domestic Japanese innovation through the company's cloud storage technology. The investment – which is said to be the largest round ever for a company in the file systems and storage segment – also marks early traction in JPIC's initiative to fill funding gaps in locally relevant technology markets.

Founded in 2011, Cloudian offers cloud storage services aimed at supporting next-generation industries associated with artificial intelligence and the internet-of-things as well as increasingly data-intensive verticals such as media, healthcare, and manufacturing. The company's technology incorporates both private and public clouds and is claimed by CEO Michael Tso to offer clients "limitless scalability, simplicity, and cloud integration."

Clients include public health agencies, Formula One racing teams, a US national research lab, an online travel company, a global carmaker, a European bank, an Ivy League university, and one of the world's largest global engineering companies. Cloudian will use the latest capital raise to expand this network through additional marketing efforts and hiring in the engineering team.

"Computing now operates without physical boundaries, and customers need storage solutions that also span from the data center to the edge," Takayuki Inagawa, president and CEO at NTT Docomo Ventures, said in a statement. "Cloudian's geo-distributed architecture creates a global fabric of storage assets that supports the next generation of connected devices."

According to IDC, the global enterprise storage market grew by 34% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2018, reaching more than $52 billion in annualized revenue. Meanwhile, the number of connected devices is expected to reach 20 billion by 2020, putting increased pressure on supercomputing capacity expansion and data infrastructure development.

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• Topics
• North America
• North Asia
• Technology
• Expansion
• USA
• Japan
• Japan Post Bank
• Eight Roads
• Goldman Sachs
• WM Partners
• Innovation Network Corp. of Japan (INCJ)
• Japan Post Insurance