$82 million in funding turns up the heat at SolidFire

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SolidFire, a Boulder startup specializing in flash data storage drives and high-performance software applications, has secured $82 million in funding. Investors include Greenspring Mills of Maryland, Silicon Valley Bank, and an undisclosed sovereign wealth fund.

Along with Silicon Valley and Boston, Colorado has become one of the three largest data storage hubs in the nation. Since Solidfire moved here from Atlanta in 2011, the company's staff has more than doubled. This Series D round is the largest single investment haul a Denver-area tech company has seen in years.

[ibimage==30190==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]“It’s a very good sign of the health of solid-state storage and also of our company,” said Jay Prassl, SolidFire's VP of marketing, in an interview. “This is about setting SolidFire up to grow not only the top line of the business, but also the bottom line.”

Last year, the company raised $31 million in a Series C round and introduced its Cloud Builders Channel Partner Program, a means for it to invest in its reseller and systems integrator partners. With this new cash infusion, SolidFire plans to onboard new engineers and expand its international operations.

SolidFire's flash drives are made by United States contractors. The compression and visualization software facilitates optimum cloud storage. The company was founded in 2010 by Dave Wright, a veteran of Rackspace, who took a long view of the market from the start. It took the company two years to roll out its initial product, but after years of hand-to-hand recruiting, cloud-storage evangelism, and a focus on execution, Wright's forethought seems to be paying off. Plunging into the Colorado market at the right time was surely a factor in that success.