LeftHand Networks Secures $20 Million in Series B Financing
3/17/2003
LeftHand Networks Secures $20
Million in Series B Financing
Sprout Group Leads
Oversubscribed Round That Funds LeftHand Networks’ Continued Customer
Acquisition and Path to Profitability
Boulder, Colorado,
March 17, 2003 -
LeftHand Networks™, a leading provider of flexible IP-SAN storage solutions,
announced today receipt of $20 million in funding, bringing the company’s total
equity investment to $39 million. The Sprout Group, the venture arm of Credit
Suisse First Boston, led the oversubscribed round, with participation from all
of LeftHand Networks’ existing venture investors.
LeftHand Networks will use this investment to expand sales, support and business
operations to meet market demand for its Network Storage Module (NSM) and
Distributed Storage Matrix ™ (DSM™) product lines. These products enable
customers to build complete IP-SANs using existing Ethernet infrastructure.
Customers are purchasing LeftHand solutions to address storage for email and
database applications, disaster recovery, and disk-based backup.
In conjunction with the funding round, LeftHand Networks will add Wayne Nemeth,
Partner at the Sprout Group, to its board of directors.
“We are very impressed with LeftHand Networks’ outstanding customer traction and
growing sales pipeline,” noted Mr. Nemeth. “This high customer demand is driven
by innovative products that meet the ever-accelerating need for storage
solutions that are price competitive and easy to manage while integrating
seamlessly into existing IT environments. This customer demand makes LeftHand
Networks an attractive investment for the Sprout Group.”
“Today’s funding milestone is further validation of the strength and value of
our solutions. Since we shipped our first products in late 2001, we’ve enjoyed
significant market traction evidenced by a strong and growing customer base,”
noted Bill Chambers, CEO of LeftHand Networks. “With this capital we’ll continue
to ramp production and focus our efforts on helping existing and future
customers reap the bottom-line benefits of implementing our IP-based storage
solutions.”
LeftHand Networks has dozens of customers in multiple industries, including
Fortune 100 and mid-size companies in manufacturing, healthcare and life
sciences, as well as governmental organizations and universities. LeftHand
Networks’ customers include Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), Mapics (Nasdaq/NM: MAPX),
Array BioPharma (Nasdaq: ARRY), and the City & County of Denver.
LeftHand Networks’ DSM™ and NSM products enable customers to create an IP-SAN
for database and application servers with standard Ethernet switches in 30
minutes or less. The built-in IP-SAN clustering, virtualization and replication
features of DSM™ create an easy to manage, highly scalable, fault tolerant
“pool” of storage that may be shared by all servers on the network. This “pool”
appears to application/database servers as a “local” disk drive that scales in
both performance and capacity as additional NSMs are added anywhere on the
network.
LeftHand Networks is based in Boulder, Colorado, a leading area for both storage
and networking innovation. Pricing for the Distributed Storage Matrix starts
below $20,000 for a complete, fully featured solution.
LeftHand Networks Inc., is a venture-backed, network storage company located in Boulder, Colorado, a leading area for both storage and networking innovation. LeftHand Networks offers a fully featured IP-based SAN that allows customers to build affordable, intelligent and highly manageable storage area networks using their existing Ethernet infrastructure. LeftHand 's Distributed Storage Matrix includes storage virtualization and management capabilities giving customers critical storage features such as pooling, replication, hot failover and snapshot capability. This allows customers to easily solve storage problems for fast-growing database applications, file sharing, disk-based backup, and disaster recovery.
For Further Information:
Brent Anderson
InterActive Public Relations
brent_anderson@ipri.com
252-215-9224
Tracey Floming
LeftHand Networks
tracey.floming@lefthandnetworks.com