Enterprise Startup Nutanix Raises A Whopping $101 Million On A $1 Billion Valuation

Enterprise startup Nutanix has officially announced another $101 million in venture capital investment, with an impressive $1 billion valuation.

We broke the news last month that Nutanix was working on this massive round. We had heard that the valuation would be in the $800 million - $900 million range, but Nutanix has topped that estimate.

With this fresh investment, the company has now raised $172.2 million in four rounds of funding. It has also leapfrogged its biggest rival, SimpliVity, which announced a big investment of its own recently, $58 million, giving it $101 million to date.

The rumor is that the next stop will be an IPO for one or both of them in the unknown (but not-too-distant) future.

Both of these companies offer an all-in-one hardware box for corporate data centers that combines a computer server and storage. In Nutanix's case, it uses flash storage from partner Fusion-io. A company can snap together multiple Nutanix boxes and they all work together. If one box needs to store more data than it has room for on its own hard drive, it simply uses a drive attached to another computer.

The concept is called "virtualized storage" and it means that companies no longer have to build expensive, separate storage networks with gear from companies like EMC or NetApp.

Nutanix didn't reveal its annual sales, but did say that it has now achieved "$100 million in lifetime sales." It was founded in 2009. Given the $1 billion valuation, it's likely most of that $100 million was done in the past year or so.

The round was led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures, the VC arm of enterprise software giant SAP. Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Greenspring Associates also contributed.