Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, announced that it received strategic investment funds from Western Digital Capital, the strategic investment fund of Western Digital Corp. This investment represents the fourth strategic player to invest in Excelero, including Micron and Qualcomm, and brings the total VC funds invested in Excelero to USD 35 million. Excelero will use the funds to accelerate its go-to-market activities worldwide.

Separate from the funding, Excelero and Western Digital have begun technical collaboration activities whereby the two firms are offering web-scale storage solutions to some of the world’s largest, most demanding enterprises and service providers. By harnessing Excelero’s award-winning NVMesh® software-defined block storage solution along with Western Digital’s NVMe SSD hardware, the companies are delivering unrivaled storage scalability, performance, and agility.

“Excelero has developed a software-defined block storage solution designed to redefine storage for web-scale applications. The company is addressing an important and growing challenge associated with traditional architectures and we are pleased to support their efforts,” said Mark Long, president, Western Digital Capital. “Western Digital is committed to providing a variety of options to customers to solve the increasing challenge of managing AI, real-time analytics and other Fast Data applications. Our new OpenFlexTM architecture and products allow for the independent scaling of compute, storage and network resources, with orchestration and management enabled through an open API. We look forward to working with Excelero to integrate and advance our technologies to create even more powerful solutions for customers in data-centric businesses.”