PrimaryIO Secures $5.6 Mn Investment From Accel, Exfinity and Partech Ventures

Storage management firm, PrimaryIO has secured seed funding of $5.6 million from Accel, Exfinity Ventures and Partech Ventures, to expedite its product development efforts.

PrimaryIO has developed breakthrough software technology for storage management for virtualized data centers as enterprises embrace the public cloud. This investment will help accelerate product development to bring innovation to the enterprise IT customers that are dealing with data center capacity, cost and performance issues, enabling them to benefit from the public cloud solutions while retaining control and security of their data.

Commenting on the development, Accel’s Dinesh Katiyar said, “Cloud computing is disrupting traditional IT at a very rapid pace and creating high growth opportunities. PrimaryIO with its domain expertise is well positioned to benefit from this market trend and we are excited to work with the team”.

Primary IO products enable virtualized applications running under VMware environments to run faster and more cost effectively by eliminating storage bottlenecks and gaining control of valuable data across the private and public cloud.

The PrimaryIO leadership team comes from Virident, Veritas, HP, and sTec. “Drawing on our deep background in storage and cluster file systems, we are uniquely positioned to help our customers overcome performance & capacity issues so they can truly take advantage of cloud-computing technologies,” said Kumar Ganapathy, CEO of PrimaryIO.

The firm is a privately funded software company focused on performance & capacity optimization solutions for business-critical applications with offices in Silicon Valley, California and Pune, India.

Chinnu Senthilkumar, Partner, Exfinity Venture Partners mentioned “As traditional enterprises and financial institutions look to embrace cloud computing, there is a need for a special computing framework for cloud transformation. PrimaryIO’s technology is designed to work with existing enterprises’ IT infrastructure without compromising performance, security and protocol while allowing them to leverage the cloud computing infrastructure”.

Speaking on the same line, Nick Petheram, CEO of Bell Integration, a leading System Integrator and channel partner in UK, Europe and Singapore said, “PrimaryIO has an exciting technology for our customers. I believe that our enterprise customers will benefit from a significant application performance, improved storage optimization and increased data-center resource utilization. We look forward to working with PrimaryIO and deliver current and next-gen data center cloud solutions to our customers”.

L’Oréal Invests an Undisclosed Amount in a Partech Ventures’ Fund

L’Oréal has announced a strategic investment in the early stage fund Partech International Venture VII managed by Partech Ventures, an international venture capitalist firm headquartered in Paris, France, with offices in Berlin and San Francisco. This investment complements L’Oréal’s comprehensive strategy to connect to the world’s hottest startup scenes and the opportunity to participate in the financing of promising early stage digital businesses.

With its focus on tech and digital champions, Partech Ventures will help L’Oréal tap into innovations and services that can transform people’s relationship to beauty through prediction and personalization tools, artificial intelligence, marketplaces and new services.

“Our unique relationship with Partech Ventures will give us access to a high quality and comprehensive sourcing of the best B2B and B2C digital players and contribute to the Group’s global strategy of Open Innovation. It will create value across the board for our brand and marketing teams and will connect us to new ideas and partners to better engage and serve our consumers,” said Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer for L’Oréal.

“We are very proud to work with L’Oréal, global leader of the beauty industry, as one of our strategic partners,” said Philippe Collombel, co-Managing Partner of Partech Ventures. “L’Oréal has been amongst the first groups to understand the full potential of digital transformation, and to integrate new tech partners and tools within its offer and organization. This partnership embodies Partech Ventures’ international DNA and will enable win-win business opportunities for L'Oréal and our portfolio companies.”

L’Oréal’s investment in a Partech Ventures fund follows the Group’s investment in the Founders Factory, a digital accelerator and incubator, announced last May. These partnerships will deepen and support L’Oréal’s broader digital innovation strategy which also includes L’Oréal’s Research and Innovation Technology Incubator located in San Francisco that has spearheaded a number of game changing digital services.

Image : Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer for L’Oréal