CloudByte raises $4M Series B round led by Fidelity Growth Partners; Nexus, Kae also participate

Bangalore and California-based cloud storage firm CloudByte Inc. has raised Series B round of funding worth $4 million, led by Fidelity Growth Partners India, the private equity arm of Fidelity Worldwide Investment. Existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Kae Capital also participated in the round. As part of the deal, Raul Rai, managing director of Fidelity Growth Partners India, will be joining CloudByte's board of directors.

With this latest round of funding, the startup raised a total of $6.1 million. The company had earlier secured $2.1 million from Nexus Venture Partners and Kae Capital.

Founded in 2011 by a team of five – Srivibhavan Balaram, Umasankar Mukkara, Shailesh Bam, Felix Xavier and Sunil Navalgi, CloudByte focuses on storage virtualisation and offers data centre storage solutions for cloud service providers and enterprises. It is headquartered in Campbell in the US, and has its engineering team in Bangalore. The money raised will be used for expanding global sales and marketing, product development and team expansion.

"As part of our diligence, we observed that CloudByte has achieved greater traction than companies that have raised much larger rounds of funding. It is refreshing to see what CloudByte has accomplished in a short period of time and we are looking forward to the company's continued success and expansion into new markets," said Raul Rai of Fidelity Growth partners.

In an interaction with Techcircle.in earlier this year, Srivibhavan Balaram, co-founder and the then CEO of CloudByte, said that the company was yet to achieve operational breakeven and was eyeing the $25 billion global storage market with its recently launched ElastiStor product. The company claimed at that time that ElastiStor helps replace fragmented storage islands in data centres with a single, extensible shared storage platform.

Earlier this month the startup roped in Greg Goelz, former GM of SanDisk, as its chief executive officer.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)