Pensando Systems raises $145 Million in Series C, comes out of Stealth Mode

Pensando Systems recently announced an investment of $145 Million in Series C round led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners.  The company was in a stealth mode to date and working on an innovative chip for networking and storage.

With the latest financing, the total investment in Pensando Systems comes to a total of $278 million after an earlier founder headed series A round of $71 million, and also a customer headed series B round of $62 million.

The company plans to use the new financing to accelerate technology, operations, and go-to marketplace activities, says the announcement.

Over the last three years, Pensando has built an ecosystem of clients, investors, and partners such as HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp, and Equinix.

Executive Opinion

CEO of Pensando Systems, Prem Jain, said, "In less than 3 years we've assembled a best in class engineering team that are experts in building systems for the cloud, compute, networking, storage and security markets. As a customer and partner first company we are focused on accelerating all aspects of our business as we go to market with a great ecosystem and a breakthrough platform."

Pensando CFO, Randy Pond, said, "Ongoing participation from early stage strategic investors and customers is a valuable performance metric for any growing business. I'm very pleased that this round also brought us two great new customer investors and a leading VC firm in HPE, Equinix and Lightspeed Venture Partners. We are now extremely well positioned to ramp our end-to-end operations,engineering and go-to-market activities for the next generation of the cloud."

Pensando's Edge Services Platform

Pensando also announced its flagship software-defined edge services platform. Pensando is the protected, programmable, edge platform that directly addresses the generational change occurring as data grows at the edge of the cloud. The Pensando platform delivers software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage, and data safety services.

Technologies like 5G, IoT, AI, and massive application growth are pushing data to the edge devices. The basis of the Pensando platform is its custom-built processor optimized to perform a software stack delivering cloud, calculate, networking, storage, and safety services wherever data is situated, all handled via the Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller.

This unique capacity gives an edge to the cloud suppliers over market leaders such as Amazon Web Services Nitro. The announcement noted that customers can expect 5-9x improvements in productivity, performance, and scale as compared to current architectures with no probability of lock-in.

Additionally, Goldman Sachs reported that ventures can transform their current infrastructure into a cloud-like environment. This will eliminate multiple legacy appliances and further improves operational simplicity and safety. At the same time enterprises can deliver functionality, scale, and observability, notes the announcement.