Google made an unusual move by investing millions in this Pittsburgh storage startup
Avere Systems
That's a little unusual, truth be told. Historically, when Google and its affiliated companies want to invest in startups, it's via CapitalG (formerly Google Capital) or GV (formerly Google Ventures), the dedicated venture capital arms of the Alphabet parent company.
It's less common for Google corporate to invest in companies, though it's not unprecedented.
And the move puts Avere Systems in good company: Previous investments that similarly came straight from the Googleplex itself included the mysterious Magic Leap, Pokémon Go developer Niantic, and even Elon Musk's SpaceX.
In the specific case of Avere, a Google spokesperson points out that the startup and its business play very nicely into one of the search giant's biggest initiatives.
Google Cloud, the company's pay-as-you-go supercomputing service, is trying to make a big push into large businesses, under the stewardship of VMware founder Diane Greene. Avere's storage products hinge on helping those same big companies make those kinds of cloud moves. In fact, Avere has been a Google Cloud partner since 2015.
"We both have this strong vision of supporting the enterprise," says Avere CEO Ron Bianchini, formerly an executive with storage company NetApp and a professor at Carnegie Mellon before that.
Hybrid
What Avere does, explains Bianchini, is build the hardware and software that lets companies pool all of their data from across the business into one storage system. From there, it's easy to analyze and otherwise process that data either with your own servers in your own data center, or else use services like Google Cloud.
You can use either your own servers or the cloud at your whim, Bianchini says. With more and more businesses looking to take advantage of the cost savings and higher scalability of the cloud, Avere's solution lets customers do it "piecemeal," a little bit at a time, gradually ramping up their cloud usage as they go.
Google
In the industry, that combined data center/cloud approach is called "hybrid cloud," and it's long been a strength of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform in particular - meaning that Google is positioning itself to eke away a little bit of one of Microsoft's biggest advantages.
This isn't the first time Google itself has made an investment to reinforce Google Cloud, either, with the search giant leading a $57 million round of funding in Cisco competitor Barefoot Networks in mid-2016.
As for Avere itself, Bianchini says that this investment should be enough to bring the company to profitability by 2018. This round included included participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and Western Digital Technologies, and brings Avere's total funding to $97 million.
"We're confident this is the last money we need," says Bianchini.
Get the latest Google stock price here.
- I spent $2,000 for 7 nights in a 179-square-foot room on one of the world's largest cruise ships. Take a look inside my cabin.
- Saudi Arabia wants China to help fund its struggling $500 billion Neom megaproject. Investors may not be too excited.
- Colon cancer rates are rising in young people. If you have two symptoms you should get a colonoscopy, a GI oncologist says.
- Audi to hike vehicle prices by up to 2% from June
- Kotak Mahindra Bank shares tank 13%; mcap erodes by ₹37,721 crore post RBI action
- Rupee falls 6 paise to 83.39 against US dollar in early trade
- Markets decline in early trade; Kotak Mahindra Bank tanks over 12%
- An Ambani disruption in OTT: At just ₹1 per day, you can now enjoy ad-free content on JioCinema