By Mike Freeman, San Diego Union-Tribune
Qualcomm Ventures joined existing investors in a recent $27 million funding round for Stratoscale, an Israeli data center software company.
Stratoscale announced the new capital raise on Wednesday. This is the third round of funding for the company but the first time Qualcomm Ventures has participated. Over the past three years, Stratoscale has raised more than $70 million.
Stratoscale makes data center management software that’s hardware agnostic. The company claims its software allows information technology to grow and respond to real-time demands with greater ease and control.
“This investment enables us to accelerate our adoption in the market and expand operations more quickly to meet the demand for an all-inclusive data center cloud offering that is scalable and efficient,” said Stratoscale Chief Executive Ariel Maislos in a statement. “We continue to deliver on the promise of what data centers should be without the burden of being locked into legacy infrastructure that doesn’t grow with your business.”
San Diego-based Qualcomm, best known for making smartphone processors and radios, is targeting cloud computing and the data center as future growth markets. For more than two years, it has been developing an energy-efficient processor chip aimed at data center computer servers, where Intel is the dominant supplier.
Qualcomm’s data center processors, based on architecture licensed from ARM Holdings, are in the demonstration phase with customers now. They’re expected to come to market in roughly a year or so.
“Qualcomm sees large growth opportunities in the data center space, and Stratoscale is positioned to become a seminal and transformative player, particularly in the midst of a current technology revolution,” said Mony Hassid, senior director, Qualcomm Ventures.
In addition to Qualcomm, Stratoscale is backed by Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Intel Capital and SanDisk Ventures. Headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, it has offices in Boston, New York and Mountain View.
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