The storage sector continues to attract investors. Tegile systems, a leading provider of hybrid storage arrays for virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, has announced the closing of its $35 million Round C funding led by late-stage venture firm Meritech Capital Partners with additional investment by original stakeholder August Capital and strategic partners Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) and SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK). With the investment, Paul Madera, managing director of Meritech, joins Tegile's board of directors. Rohit Kshetrapal, CEO of Tegile said that it will use the money to accelerate the expansion of its IT, strengthen its sales and customer support efforts throughout its North American and European channels, and accelerate its new product/technology development.


The round's lead investor, Meritech, focuses its investment portfolio solely on late-stage technology companies. The strategic equity investment extends Tegile's existing relationship with HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, to include joint technology development. The companies are working together on next-generation storage technology and solutions that are optimized for a wide range of industries and applications, including server virtualization, VDI, database hosting and file services.


Tegile has been aggressively building the company from the outset to become the only one having generated more revenue than it has taken in outside financing. Before opening its Round C funding, Tegile improved its sales and revenues from doubling every two quarters to doubling every quarter. "The time has come for us to scale the financial success we have thus far been afforded and leverage these opportunities for even greater revenue prospects and increased sales," says Kshetrapal. "The financing we have secured in this latest funding round allows us to do just that. We are pleased that our Round C investors include two strategic partners that will strengthen both our relationship and product roadmap even further".