Startup Nimble Storage is on a tear. Today it announced another $40.7 million round of funding, led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.
That's $98 million to date in three rounds on an over $500 million valuation, according to VC Experts.
Although Nimble was founded five years ago, its only been shipping its product since 2010, CEO Suresh Vasudevan told Business Insider.
It makes a flash storage system for the enterprise. Flash memory is the kind used in cell phones and thumb drives. It allows companies to pack a lot more data into tinier spaces while not losing any performance. This saves them a ton of money over traditional systems offered by the likes of EMC, Dell, and NetApp.
It's especially important in today's cloud world, where companies are storing fewer files on PCs and servers and a lot more on on centralized (and traditionally very expensive) storage systems in the data center.
Part of the reason Nimble is hot is the company's pedigree. It was founded by Varun Mehta, who was employee No. 11 at NetApp and the former vice president of engineering for Data Domain, a disruptive backup-storage provider sold to EMC for $2.1 billion in 2009.
This company has all the makings of another huge hit. It now has 600 enterprise customers and added 175 new ones just in the last quarter, Vasudevan, Nimble's CEO, told Business Insider. He expects Nimble to hit $50 million to $60 million in revenue this year.
Traditional storage vendors are starting to take notice, Vasudevan claims.
"EMC, NetApp, Dell—those are three we see all the time where our win rates are really high," he says, meaning Nimble is winning lots of deals against them.
Nimble is on track for an IPO, Vasudevan said. If things are still going this well "by the second half of next [year], we'll start thinking about it," he said.
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